Woven
by gekizetsu
Summary: Not all doors stay locked, and lightning often strikes twice. Sequel to If Belief Was Enough and grandsequel to And Fools Shine On. Complete.
1. prologue

**Woven** - prologue  
(_Week three in the Month of Open Doors series_)  
(c)2006 b stearns

-I-

a/n: Three or more tales on the same theme is a series, I suppose, requiring that I name it. _Sam and Dean's Bogus Journey_ didn't stick. This is the sequel of _If Belief Was Enough_ and the grand-sequel of _And Fools Shine On_.

* * *

-I-

Dean has a problem with abandoned houses.

Sam calls it that in the forefront of his mind. Down where he tells the truth whether he wants to or not, he acknowledges that it's more of an obsession. He's always had a thing for abandoned houses regardless of age, as far back as Sam could remember. The older the better, but there had been a few newer ones as well.

They were headed east to Colorado, not quite out of Washington, when Sam asked to stretch because the silence was freaking him out. At first the quiet had been mutual, then forced, then intolerable. Dean suddenly didn't even want to listen to _music_. The tension was all on Sam's part, because Dean was lost in thought and not paying any attention.

Sam figured Dean had to know what Sam had done, even if only on a subconscious level. He had to. They didn't treat each other any differently when they were talking, but damn if he just wouldn't look Sam in the face. He wasn't even doing it on purpose, Sam could tell. He just couldn't seem to stand to look at Sam.

Sam couldn't bring it up. Not without launching into fullscale disclosure, and selfishly, he didn't want that. He wanted to believe that if he left it all alone, it would fade with time like all their other scars did. In the meantime, Sam listened as hard as he could for the things he knew would mean his haphazard, accidental stitches weren't holding. What the hell he'd do if it happened, he wasn't sure. The night before he'd dreamt that if he didn't keep that same grip on Dean's jacket that he'd had that night in the car, Dean would come apart in his hands like so much shattered glass. If he didn't keep pressure on all the wounds at once...

He wasn't sure what he'd left behind of himself, or how much he was imagining. He didn't want to invent trouble where it didn't exist yet, but he was so used to anticipating things.

They pulled off into some town just outside Spokane. Dean got turned around trying to get back onto the 90, and ended up on a backroad that allowed him to pass this particular house in a clearing. He didn't say anything, and didn't have to. Sam simply expected that they'd check it out. There was some sort of plastic dish left on the side of the road; signs offering tree service, an old and uniform set of white crosses heralding an accident that had left a permanent mark. A rabbit carcass lay still unnoticed by scavengers.

The lines of layered cirrus clouds to the west forced the dying sun into a tower of champagne light that backlit the house as they jumped the ditch, Dean in the lead. Soft shining whisper-lines of ghostfog hung in the last of the light past a line of windbreak trees, bordering a wide open space full of low grass and tangles of berry bushes. Destruction and death had left markers and made open space and opportunity for other things to crowd.

This house dated back to maybe the late 1800's, and it was obvious it had never been wired for electricity. Two stories of weathered cedar stood gray against the sky, leaning just a little to the south, the fireplace and chimney left as both heart of the house and final point of integrity. The brick and mortar were gray as well, with only hints of ochre left from whatever clay it had been made from. The shake roof wasn't open to the elements yet even though most of the shakes were missing, but the entire rear wall and the porch that was attached to it had collapsed, and the elements had been inside getting comfortable ever since. Birds and bats and probably field mice had converted it to an ideal shelter.

Dean stood in the field just outside what must have once been the back yard for a long moment, staring.

Sometimes Dean burned them. Sam never tried to stop him; he was less interested in preserving the history or saving someone's rightful (rundown) property than he was in allowing Dean to cleanse some corner of shadow from his mind by doing it. He doesn't hinder but he doesn't try and help, either. This is a solitary venture that Dean doesn't even seem to derive any satisfaction from; it's a grim undertaking, and he oversees the death of each house with the same gravity he would lend to closing the staring eyes of any startled victim.

Sam watched Dean pick his way through the remainder of the porch and began to follow, because it meant they were going to search the house. Dean was already in the parlor area when Sam stepped far enough into the dimmed recesses to get a sense of the place. Ornate chair rail ringed the open space; windows, free of glass for decades, gaped from ceiling to knee height and let the last of the light in. The hardwood floors were warped and faded, and several boards were missing to Sam's right, leaving a stark precursor to the freshly half-eaten rat that lay near it. They'd probably startled an owl. The fireplace to the left and its hearth took up the majority of the space, cradling the set of stairs that still led up into darkness. Dean had gone around to the other side, and Sam could hear his steps testing the boards.

Dean was full of quirks. Sam knew them but didn't examine them because they were mostly to distract anyone from really seeing him. The remainder had to do with either the real Dean or his attempt to keep himself together. Rituals and keepsakes, reminders and warnings. The things he did automatically were all a matter of training or rigid discipline, and only recently had Sam come to understand that these were the seams of a soul that had already been coming apart because they hadn't been enough to keep it from weathering constant damage. There had never been enough buffer from the shock, or from the times he'd been left without someone at his back.

Sam was getting whispers and suggestions back, pictures drawn on fog-covered windows that returned in half-patterns on dryer days. He doubted he'd ever understand what had happened in those few moments he'd spent folding Dean back together, but what little he could remember made him feel like he understood his brother without being able to say why.

They don't talk about the houses. They never have. Sam's always thought maybe it was to keep spirits from gathering or a preventative measure for any local kids who might think about using it for rituals, but he's not really sure. He's always left certain things alone because he's fairly sure Dean has declared ownership over them and talking about them rendered them powerless. Like the singing.

He'd keep the music down if Sam was sleeping, but he'd sing along without realizing it on dark roads, a soft and perfect pitch, giving a bit of himself away to it. Saying _Dean you have an awesome voice_ meant never hearing it again so Sam paid to hear it with his silence.

He wasn't sure he'd done either of them any favors.

"Sam."

The first use of his name in hours made Sam jump. He'd been staring out the empty windows so hard that their shapes had made negative imprints on his retinas as he looked away. He walked around the fireplace into what might have once been a kitchen, then into a back room. Wallpaper hung in strips of dried mold, some faded floral pattern in blues wilting toward the buckled floor. Nailed to the wall was a standing cupboard of some sort, probably for keeping food warm until it was served. Dean was trying to pry the front of it open, something no longer easy after years of temperature changes and dampness had swelled the wood in place.

"No way there's anything in here," Dean said.

Sam dug his nails into the crease in the wood and hoped they held. With both of them working at it, it took only a moment for the wood to give with a shriek. They both stepped back in case there was any kind of pissed off vermin, but there were only dusty shelves. Dean shrugged, pounded Sam on the shoulder, and rounded the fireplace to make for the stairs.

Sam hated it when there was more than one story to the houses. For whatever reason, they had yet to fall through anywhere no matter how hard Dean pushed his luck; still, Sam could always feel the space below waiting for them. Dean pounded on the stairs as he went, making sure they were sturdy, and from the sounds of it, they were. They were hemmed in with the fireplace on one side and the kitchen wall on the other, making for a disturbingly close space.

Once Dean reached the top, there was silence again.

Sam waited to hear him test the boards above, knowing he would be sticking to the floor along the walls just in case. Sometimes he ran right across the center just to drive Sam nuts. Sam always begged off second - or, God help him, third - stories, letting Dean jeer him for being chicken. Sam always retorted with _I have to stay down here to drag you out of the wreckage_. Dean seemed to believe the houses would never fall on him or fail, and Sam had to wonder at the fact that ruined buildings engendered more faith than the people he knew.

Maybe Dean burned them for that reason - because they were poor substitutes. Maybe he simply felt their abandoned loneliness and was putting each one out of its misery.

Sam wanted to stand there and learn what the house knew and carry it with him.

Dean was still quiet, standing in place somewhere above and most likely staring out windows no one would ever stare out of again. Sam thought, _as above, so below_.

-I-


	2. Chapter 1

**Woven** - 1?  
(c)2006 b stearns  
Spoilers for season one.  
**Warning:** cursing. Like usual.  
**a/n:** The first line is a direct quote from my sister. Props _again_ and _often_ to Maygra for inspiration. Posthumous apologizes to the jogger who met a perfectly-angled bolt of lightning at a nearby park about 10 years ago. Kids: don't jog near trees when it's thundering. _Fire hurties_, _head go boom_.

* * *

_Fort Morgan, Colorado_

-I-

"There's always some drunk bitch with a quarter," Dean said.

Sam wasn't listening; he was keeping one eye on the baseball game on the TV hanging from a corner of the ceiling to his left and the other was engaged in poking through the journal yet again. The smallest details popped occasionally. He had never perused the thing like Dean had - he didn't have the pages memorized and idolized as the New Winchester Bible, and sometimes the distance gave him an advantage.

Dean knew Sam wasn't listening because he could feel Sam's attention when it was on him, the last couple of days. That was something he never tried to understand or consciously acknowledge, because his finely tuned sense of self preservation cringed from it. It made him behave differently, better or worse depending on the situation. Admitting he knew it was there led to admitting he needed it, and that wasn't kosher. So the running commentary tonight was for his own benefit, and externalizing every small annoyance was satisfying.

"Not good enough to let the radio play, it's gotta be all this shit your little friends like to listen to," Dean said, the last aimed at Sam only because he knew it wasn't heard. Sam hated the 'your little friends' designation, meaning _people your age_ and/or _college kids_. It was purposely derogatory and belittling and Dean only used it to push Sam's buttons because even bad press is still press. The girl at the jukebox was wearing camo pants and a tank top and wasn't Dean's type, so he felt free to vent his ire on her from a distance because she was forcing him to listen to rap. It was one of those newer boxes that let you download anything from the internet, and he thought someone should fix it so that only certain things came down the pike.

The impact to the stool he was sitting on was violent enough to catch him off guard and it nearly sent him off balance. He grabbed the edge of the table in both hands, frowning at Sam.

Sam drew his foot back. He'd never even looked up. "If you're that bored," he said softly enough that Dean had to lean forward to catch it, "...go sit in the car. I kinda remember a Black Sabbath marathon at the last bar we were at, and only you - "

"Have decent taste in music," Dean said. "Shut up. All you had to do was ask, if you're lookin' for something in there."

Sam raised his eyes without raising his face, looking at Dean from beneath his brows and keeping his expression neutral. Dean held his gaze for only an instant, then glanced at bad-rap-camo-pants again for distraction.

Sam kept looking at him, wishing he had the guts to stand up to Dean the way he'd always stood up to their father. He wanted to shove him into corners and demand answers, but it wasn't the same. He held respect for Dean that he never would for anyone else, and even worse, a soft spot. He had no problem telling Dean when he was wrong or an asshole, had tried to walk away a second time, but he only stood up to Dean when he was incredibly pissed off. It was too hard otherwise and took steel he wanted to reserve for things that deserved it. It felt like cruelty, and he no longer had it in him to approach even perceived cruelty with Dean.

"Dad's got nothing in here about spooklights," Sam said. "He's never run into them before, so, another first we get to add to this thing." He unfolded the scrap of newspaper again, ignoring the fact that he'd worn it thin with folding; he'd been looking at it almost compulsively since he'd found it. It gave him something to do with his hands, somewhere else to look but Dean.

Roughly a hundred people were killed in the US by lightning every year. In Fort Morgan, Colorado, someone was killed by it once a week with or without a storm in the area and no one seemed to have heard thunder. Locals had 'seen floating lights', so the papers had assumed ball lightning. The article Sam held was the only one that had a point map of each sighting in addition to each death. Joggers, dogwalkers, one girl on horseback. Dean had given the article a cursory glance, then laughed about the 'lightning safety' warnings at the bottom: stay away from trees, get off the golf course, drop your umbrella, crouch down and cover your head. Dean's addition had been _stop, drop, roll and kiss your ass goodbye_.

Floating lights in the daylight and after dark. Spooklights, _ignis fatuus_, will o' the wisps. Not their regular thing, but mainly because little lights weren't usually involved in the modus operandi of anything that tended to prey on the masses. Orbs and spooklights were giveaways of spirit activity and not much else. It was light sometimes seen over marshy ground, believed to be burning gas containing methane from decaying organic matter. Some Australian scientist had suggested that the phenomenon might be caused by barn owls, which apparently sometimes developed a ghostly glow due to a light-emitting honey fungus that they picked up from rotting trees.

"Spooklights are like the Care Bears of the spirit world, that's why," Dean said, turning his beer bottle in place with two fingers near the top. "They only mean there's something else there. They don't actually do anything."

"When they're mistaken for ball lightning, and seen in the daylight, it tells me they're a little bigger than usual," Sam said.

"Well, no one's disappearing, right?" Dean said. "So they're not leading anybody off to fairy land or anything. It's probably a few really pissed off locals who don't realize they're dead yet." He paused. "Sidhe?"

"I'm not sure," Sam said. "But, hey, why Sidhe in the middle of Colorado? What is it about this one place?"

"That's your deal, geek-boy," Dean said. "I don't understand why you don't have it figured out yet. Why d'you think I even keep you around? Your weight drags the car down and lowers my gas mileage, and you sure as hell aren't good company."

Sam glanced up at him again, hoping Dean would look back long enough to get flipped off, but Dean's eyes skittered away immediately.

"I'm assuming this is all one area," Dean said, frowning at camo girl again. She was dancing now. Dean recognized it as the Three Sheets to the Wind dance.

"Sort of," Sam said. "Suburbs, mostly. There's no pattern that I can see, or anything, but it's in one basic area."

"Any massacres or anything go on over there?" Dean said.

"History of the area isn't panning out so far," Sam said, still staring at him. "I haven't tried everything yet, though. How come we didn't burn that house?"

Dean swiveled his head back to look at Sam for just a moment, then he looked at the tabletop instead. Sam waited. He folded the article again, because maybe when he unfolded it the next time it would tell him more and maybe Dean would be as readable.

"It wasn't ready to go yet," Dean said, then slid off his stool. "Try not to get kidnapped while I take a leak. Or if you do, try for something like a team of cheerleaders this time."

Sam smirked.

-I-

Neighborhoods and trails, parks and schoolyards and vacant lots. Suburbia, with all its white noise; nearby freeways and the occasional commercial airliner overhead. Sam liked the complacent sameness of it, knowing Dean would snub his nose at the idea of settling down in a place like this. The nine-to-fivers with their regimented, predictable lives were a bare step above cattle in Dean's estimation. They were automatons with zombie-like propensities for staring at computers and TV's. He didn't have to say it aloud. They were necessary evils on his way to the next real thing. They didn't _live_ the way Winchesters lived, free of the pedantic and pedestrian, tasting every breath and not expecting the next to come, taking nothing for granted.

They started with the site of the most recent death, a side road where a jogger with a portable CD player had been running at dusk. The CD inside had been found hanging precariously by its center hole from a branch nearly fifty yards away; one of her shoes, laceless, had been across the road, blown off with the rest of her clothing. She was only identifiable by a small tattoo on one ankle; she'd had two amalgam fillings but they'd melted, and in any case her teeth had burned along with most of her skin. Dean had theorized that her eyes had probably exploded, boiling right out of her head, and Sam had pretended not to hear. He was well aware of what high voltage could do, and he didn't want to give Dean a reason to keep talking about it but he didn't want him to stop either for once. Dean was caught up and macabrely fascinated and not pausing to think that Sam probably didn't want to know what happened when girls burned.

Dean kept his eyes on the side of the road, and Sam wasn't sure what he was looking for. They were on the right road, but as for the exact location, nothing in the papers or reports online pinpointed the spot. It had been a week since the strike and it hadn't received much more than a sixth page notice below the fold to begin with. Freak accidents were only cool for a day, and then they were just local color. The sum of a life reduced to a non-story.

Dean pulled to the right suddenly, onto the gravel, and killed the engine. He checked over his shoulder before he pushed the door open and waved Sam along.

Sam unfolded himself and waited with his forearms on the roof of the car while Dean jogged across the road. He scuffed a foot, looked up into the branches of the oak that was towering over the spot, then crouched down to look at the surface of the road. Sam left his door open and meandered across the road without bothering to check for traffic. He could see for almost half a mile in either direction and it wasn't a well-traveled road. He stood a few feet away from Dean and watched.

"Sam," Dean said. "Look."

Sam glanced, then came closer when Dean didn't offer anything else. He was staring at the edge of the asphalt directly across from the trunk of the old oak.

"It's lightning glass," Dean said.

The hole was about three feet across and jagged-edged, nearly deep enough to breach all of the road's layers. The asphalt had fused to glass, obsidian black and reflective, an uneven gouge in the artificial surface. Dean pulled the EMF meter out of one pocket and switched it on. It wailed fitfully for a moment, then stopped. When he moved a little, it started up again, then trailed off.

"Residuals," he said as if to himself. "Maybe some of it's just...there was a lot of juice through here." He nodded toward the melted spot in the road. "Fulgurite, I think it's called," he said. "Usually if it hits where there's sand, it makes shapes..." He trailed off. "You know all this. You don't need me to say it."

"Yeah I do," Sam mumbled. "For the first time in my life I just wanna hear your voice."

Dean turned without rising. "What?"

"Nothing."

"That wasn't _nothing_. If you've got something to say, Sam, say it."

"Why?" Sam said. "It's never anything you'd want to hear, and even if you did you'd just ignore it."

Dean pushed back to his feet with his hands against his thighs and turned all the way toward Sam, hands on hips, feet apart, the set of his shoulders letting Sam know there was going to be a confrontation. Sam didn't look at his face and didn't need to; he kept his gaze somewhere in the middle of Dean's chest. Nothing even approaching confrontation came, and Sam didn't glance up, choosing to wait him out. He could do that, he'd always done that, except usually he was rolling his eyes and sighing. Younger Sam had done those things. Older Sam was too tired and had been through it all before and no longer had the urge to be impatient.

"I could have this conversation with any girlfriend," Dean said.

"If you'd ever really had one," Sam retorted.

"Yeah, accuse me of being evasive and then stand there and do the whole righteous prick act," Dean said, but he took a step away. "Nothing's ever stopped you from speaking your mind before. I think it takes an act of God to make you stop talking. So if something's going on with you, now's the time. Under a tree on the side of the road. Where we do all our best business."

Sam dropped his eyes to the..._act of God_ near his feet, thinking about the heat it took to make glass of anything. Lightning often reached temps three times that of the surface of the sun, changing the nature of things when it made contact along the path of least resistance. He tilted his head back to look at the oak, finding scorch marks along the branches directly above them and an area of missing leaves that had let the lightning through. It had chosen to ignore the highest point and had angled through the branches as if it had purpose.

"I don't have a problem," Sam said, still looking at the tree. "With you, anyway. I just, uh..." He looked directly at Dean, watching Dean almost immediately drop his eyes. It made him feel so _defeated_. "You don't even know you're doing it," Sam said, voice ringing with sadness before he could adjust it. "Do you. I fucked up, here, and I don't know how to fix it."

"If this is about the goddamn asylum thing again - " Dean started.

"No," Sam said. "You still think about that a lot, though. I can't blame you for it."

Dean was opening his mouth to ask Sam how he knew that, but Sam was already moving on because he didn't want to have to explain how he _knew_. "There've been times since that I could have and maybe should have taken you out and didn't, times when something with your face was asking for it and I couldn't because it was _your face_ and I was all me." He felt like he was losing his ability to do more than gush, and he hated it but he wasn't sure he could reign himself in after all the silence. "You don't ever have to understand that, or believe me, because I probably don't deserve it. You could look at me, though, because anything I've done, any of it? I never meant to hurt you. You could just look at me when you talk to me, or if you can't just tell me why."

Dean stared right at him for a long moment, taken aback and not bothering to hide it. He could see how upset Sam was and it made a difference. "You're like a lighthouse, Sam," Dean said softly, and Sam tensed. "I don't have any other way to explain it, it's just...you're kind of too bright to look at all of a sudden. If it was ever like that for you while I was...whatever I was, then..." He was stumbling, and he knew it. He just wasn't good at this, but he was trying. He dropped his eyes again. When he could finally look up, he realized how pale Sam had become. "What."

"That's what Once called me," Sam said. "A lighthouse."

Dean looked away again. "Once..."

"Is what I called it," Sam said. "It didn't have a name of its own, I don't think, and I couldn't assign your name to it."

"What exactly did you do for a week, with that chasing you?" Dean said. "You ever gonna tell me?"

"I ran," Sam said. "Don't change the subject."

"Neither of us knows what the fucking subject is," Dean said. "That thing's what started all of this. If I was getting...loose again, you'd tell me, right? Because last time you didn't."

"I didn't know what was going on," Sam said. "I still don't. I don't know how I put you back together, or whether I did something to mess you up when I did, because maybe you aren't really back together, maybe I only put things back where I thought they should be, and - "

"Sammy," Dean said softly.

Sam looked toward him but not directly at him, trying to keep from _burning _Dean with what they'd left behind on each other's souls. "You were like one of those stupid glowsticks we were always carrying," he said. "The ones we'd poke holes in so we could find our way in the dark. You left tracks and smears everywhere, and I'm afraid they'll never fade. I'm afraid of what might be able to track you because I didn't find a way to keep you from leaving yourself everywhere. I'm not worrying for the sake of giving myself something to do this time. I'm not being neurotic. _I messed with who you are_."

"I feel fine," Dean said. "Did you think I was...pissed, or being weird about you having your hands places I'd never let anybody else touch?"

There was no sarcasm in his tone, but Sam quirked his mouth and turned his head away all the same.

"What the fuck is wrong with you, Sam?" Dean said. "Who the hell else was going to put me back? Who the hell else knows where things go? I don't."

Sam was shaking his head, not actually negation, just reaction.

"Well...knock it off, then," Dean said. "Dumbass."

"I don't know what I did," Sam said. "I'm not sure how I did it. I don't know if you're gonna come apart again." He wanted to admit that he was pretty sure he'd used part of whatever passed for his own soul to patch Dean back together, but he didn't want to sound maudlin.

"And we can worry about it if it actually happens," Dean said. "You didn't hurt me. We didn't end up in the damn hole. Winchesters, two, stupid holes, nothing. Maybe I should kick your ass a little more often." He tucked the meter away and looked up into the tree again, frowning. "Let's get out of here, get shitfaced, and check a few other spots in the morning. The bodies are all buried, so no chance of looking at any of 'em. Unless..."

"No, Dean," Sam said automatically. "No digging. Go get autopsy photos off I'm sure they're there already."

Dean shrugged. "If you're gonna be that way...figure out what all these folks have in common besides where they live. I'll look at all the little ground zeros."

"Not alone," Sam said. "You don't check every spot alone."

Dean looked at him for a moment before looking away again. His expression was inscrutible, but Sam _knew_ without _knowing _that Dean was agreeing but having a hard time doing it. He didn't want to split up, he was actually apprehensive for once about going anywhere alone, and all he could do was be quiet while Sam told him how it would be. It was a strange place for Sam to find himself.

"We don't know what's here and I'm not sure what can 'see' you," Sam said. "So don't even try it."

"I don't wanna play Whitney Houston to your Kevin Costner," Dean said with a smirk.

"Oh, you _wish_," Sam said, beginning to cross the road toward the car.

"We're fine, Sam," Dean said. When Sam stopped in the middle of the road but didn't react otherwise, he repeated it louder with emphasis on the _we're._

There was a long moment of some kind of waiting, but not for any particular thing. Then Sam bolted for the car the same time Dean did, as if a starter's pistol had gone off, the two of them in perfect synch. Dean was faster but Sam had a head start, and he raised a forearm to the side to block Dean from getting to the driver's side doorhandle.

"You are _not driving,_" Dean growled, trying to get around him.

"Yes I am, Whitney," Sam said, sticking one foot between Dean's ankles and hooking it behind a knee.

Three solid minutes of scuffling later, someone drove by and slowed enough to make it seem as if they thought they should get involved. Sam and Dean both waved and grinned, Sam with one hand holding Dean's head away and Dean with one hand in a death grip on Sam's shirt.

Sam drove.

-I-


	3. Chapter 2

Damn, you guys who're reviewing are kicking my ass with great comments. A million thanks.

**Woven, 2-?**  
(c)2006 b stearns  
Warnings: cursing. Cursity curse-curse.

* * *

-I-

They were silent when they checked in to another small-town inn just after the bars closed. They were both buzzed, but not drunk. By unspoken agreement, neither of them wanted to be stuck playing designated driver but neither wanted to let their guard down either. Sam had appointed himself sentinel over what Dean might let loose, and Dean was just following his normal habits without conscious thought. _Sam is jumpy, watch Sam_.

Not even bothering to flip channels, Dean threw himself faceup on his bed - the color scheme of which was some fascinating mix of department store kitsch - and folded his hands under his head. Sam tucked weapons in easily reached places out of sight, then did the same. His feet dangled off the edge of the bed, eliciting the same sigh it had from him for months. Basketball players probably didn't have to deal with it; their riders likely had all kinds of stipulations about furniture size.

"Lightning starts on the ground," he said.

Dean was silent for a long moment. Then he said, "Random."

"No," Sam said. "A positive charge builds up on the ground because the negative charge in the bottoms of clouds forces the negative charge on the ground to repel the positive, and they're always trying to get to each other. They have to."

"Opposites attract," Dean said, but it was slow and distant, as if he'd meant to say something else. Or as if he was saying something else.

"The positive charge sort of...reaches up," Sam said.

"Until a negative charge decides to shake hands," Dean said. "Good, fine. Go to sleep, Sam."

"All kinds of things can generate a positive charge," Sam said. "And lightning was usually a sign that any god of choice was pissed off about something."

"'He sent out arrows, and scattered them; lightning bolts, and He vanquished them'," Dean said. "The Book of Samuel, New King James version. You can always blame somebody up there, huh? You're not suggesting the big guy is - "

"No," Sam said. "Just...you know. Thinking aloud." He didn't even come close to asking why Dean had the Book of Samuel memorized. Dean probably had the Bible memorized. And the Koran. "It might not be anything. But if you want to really make a point or you're trying to get attention, it's a really good way of doing it. There's just no way it's a concidence - the lights, the lightning."

"St. Elmos's fire?" Dean said.

"But on cloudless days?" Sam said. "The negative charge has nowhere to start from."

"Sure it does," Dean said. "And we'll get to that right after coffee in the morning. You're just as bad now as you were when you were five. Don't wanna go to bed, have to watch one more show, have to read one more story, have to theorize on zombies."

Sam rolled over and shut the light off. "Whatever, Dean," he said. But he was asleep after only another minute or two of thinking into the dark.

A bare hour of time had passed undisturbed when Dean felt his brain click on again. Some latent sense kicked in, and he knew he hadn't heard anything. He lay still, waiting for something more, hovering right between the comforting layers of sleep and waking. When he opened his eyes to the dark, there was a soft-focus face only inches from his.

He recoiled hard, scooting back across the bed, one hand making a practiced sweep under the pillow for his knife, the other shoving him back and away. The blade caught a slash of brightness from the safety lights in the parking lot when he raised it, still moving away, and the face - pale and disembodied, just holes for eyes - hovered soulless and waiting in place.

He never turned his back on it; his feet met the floor on the other side of the bed in a silent crouch. He held the blade out in front of him, between Sam and the intruder, hilt angled along his palm for the best leverage. He froze there, eyes catching the last of the light, shining with readiness.

The face faded without retreating; it dimmed until it matched the background of the room. Dean held his position, careful not to move, eyes searching the dark for anything that suggested movement or a change in the light. He never let a moment of doubt touch him; he'd seen it. He hadn't been dreaming. He hadn't had that much to drink. He trusted his senses and reactions, and once he had his other hand on the shotgun under the bed he trusted that too. He kept his breathing even, knowing he needed the air but not too much of it, not enough to make him lightheaded. He didn't feel anything odd - that was Sam's department - but it didn't matter. The room hadn't grown cold, there was no change in the air pressure. Sam remained asleep behind him, and he knew that not only because Sam wasn't already on the floor beside him but because he could sense the status of his presence. He didn't question it or wonder why that was.

Nothing came out of the dark for him. A minute passed, two, and he felt his calves begin to cramp from the position he was in. He should move, he should wake Sam...

A smear of almost-light moved across the far wall, something slow and trailing, fading as it wavered at chest height. A pale face with open, missing eyes. He'd barely registered what he was seeing when a second, smaller apparition flourished into view in midair like an intake of breath.

The blast was enough of a shock that he might as well have set off a bomb. He'd lifted the shotgun without hesitation, taking aim at the larger of the two faces and putting a salt-charge scatter of shot into the wall. Both faces winked out as Dean opened his eyes to the post-shot dark; he'd saved his eyes from some of the flash by blinking in the right spot.

The silence that followed was loud above the ringing of his ears, but he heard one of Sam's knees hit the floor. When he could risk turning his head, he was met with the sight of Sam aiming a 9mm steadily at the walls from across his own bed, eyes wide but calm. Silent. Ready, always ready.

"You're late," Dean said softly, eyes back on the walls.

"Are you okay?" Sam said.

"Yeah, but we've got company. I don't know what it is."

Light flooded the room from the lamp on Sam's nightstand. "We've gotta get out of here anyway," Sam said. "You just blew a hole in the fuckin' wall."

Dean stood, blade dangling from one hand, shotgun from the other, wary and beginning to feel the negative effects of the adrenaline creeping in on him. Trembling that started in the center, a feeling of disconnection. A door slammed on the other side of the wall, and he could hear feet making a dash for safety somewhere in the hallway beyond.

They gathered their stuff with the speed of anyone who had a lot of practice in moving on at a moment's notice, knowing where each thing was and grabbing without needing to look. They were gone long before the first siren split everything down the middle.

Sam drove by unspoken default so that Dean could keep his eyes on as much of the darkness as he could take in at once and gesture with his hands while he talked. He described what he'd seen in detail so that Sam would have it too, so they could both see it and so Sam would be able to help him piece it all together. His voice was matter-of-fact.

"They weren't male or female, they didn't make any aggressive moves, I got the impression they could see me even though they didn't have eyes. They looked like things do when they try to be human."

"And it was right by your face when you woke up," Sam said.

"Yeah," Dean said. "Whatever it was, it had me dead to rights, and all it did was stare."

"Did it seem like it had been there awhile?" Sam said, voice pitched lower. Dean wasn't outwardly shaken but Sam was going to be careful because if it had been him, he would be scared.

Dean paused long enough to make it clear he was weighing the question. "Yeah."

"Like maybe we've attracted something and it's found us," Sam said. They shared a glance, acknowledging what ran beneath. _We_ and _us_ and none of it coming as any surprise.

"Well, good for it," Dean said. "Now it can fuck off."

"Can I make a suggestion?" Sam said in that soft and earnest tone Dean imagined would have gone over well in any courtroom. Dean shrugged in his peripheral vision. "Next time it would be great if you didn't _wake me with a shotgun, _Dean."

"Dude, seems to me that's what it _took_," Dean said. "You should have been awake long before that. Can't hold your liquor."

Sam shook his head, stepping on a grin as he kept his eyes on the road. "So what hangs around just to stare?" he said. "It...they...could have had us both before we woke up."

"Hangs around to stare _without eyes_," Dean corrected.

"Did it seem like the salt actually drove them off, or just the noise?" Sam said.

"_Don't interview me_," Dean said sharply, sliding down in the passenger seat.

"Okay," Sam said in his most deliberate _it's gotta be like this_ voice. "How about 'keep talking because Sam is dragging ass even though his brother scared the shit out of him ten minutes ago'? Keep me awake and figure this out." He was getting better at lying again, even to Dean. If he could keep Dean from shutting down on him, he could get him to stay with him in ways that meant more than just sitting with him in the car.

"Sure as hell had nothing to do with what we're here for," Dean said. "They weren't spooklights or orbs, or even full manifestations."

"Then we wait for them to show up again and ask them what they want," Sam said. He grinned when Dean stared at him. "Man, if it turns out the salt didn't affect them, it's because we might've run into something for once that isn't trying to kill anybody."

"Never happen," Dean said.

"Yeah, you can probably convince just about anything that killing you is necessary," Sam added. "You're so, so good at it."

-I-

Getting the hell out of sight was a good idea, and to do that they headed two towns over and parked behind a small one-story motel. The twenty-something behind the counter didn't look as if he found anything odd about anyone checking in at 3:30. Dean tried to reciprocate by not finding anything odd about the fact that their room key came with a Winnie The Pooh keychain.

They sat with the lights off, Sam on one of the beds and Dean at the desk against the wall next to the TV stand.

"Don't fall asleep on me," Dean whispered.

"I'm not one of your dates," Sam said.

"Ooh, you're a mean drunk, Sammy," Dean said. "Real bad-tempered."

Sam chose not to respond. He kept an eye on Dean's outline in the dark, watching him put his feet up on the desk and tip his chair back. He tried to remember the last time he'd been on a genuine stakeout with Dean, and nothing came to mind if he ruled out the week before. Things found them if they placed themselves in the right places. They so rarely had to wait. And they so rarely knew exactly what to expect.

They both heard it when the chain slid itself off the door. Dean put his feet down, and Sam froze. They shared a glance in the dark, automatically looking at each other even if they couldn't clearly see. Sight wasn't necessary to make the connection. Neither of them got to their feet until the deadbolt and the automatic lock in the knob clicked open at the same time. Then it was a repeat of the moment two hours earlier with weapons at the ready and hands steady, shoulder to shoulder facing the door.

The door didn't open. Whatever it was, it had paused at just touching the locks. It wanted them to know it was there and that the locks didn't matter. The chain continued to swing, catching ambient bits of light from outside. The darkness had changed a fraction. The darkest hour before dawn hovered above, the coming day hesitating and holding its breath.

When the pulling started, Dean couldn't register it because it was such a foreign feeling. There was nothing physical about it but 'pulling' was as close as he could come to describing it, and he knew it was wrong, it was _so fucking wrong_ that he'd have been screaming if he'd still had any control over his body. He had no urge to step forward or open the door. Whatever it was didn't need him to, didn't need to control him, just needed _him_. It felt like he was sinking, like it was able to steal whatever was trailing, but it couldn't get its hands on him the way Sam had, not yet, couldn't find dead center, but all he did was stand there like nothing was happening. It felt familiar, like he'd had a suggestion of it from the corners of his eyes before, as if he'd heard it coming, Dopplering toward him for days and days. It didn't matter if that made sense or not; he could only feel as if he'd known it all along and the piper was getting paid by stretching him out along the lines of whatever made him who he was, each grain of sand in the jar separated out by color and accounted for. He didn't realize that he was choking or that Sam heard it. He didn't realize that Sam felt a _loss_.

Sam grabbed him and pulled him away from the door, dropping his own gun to do it. He got both hands on Dean's shirt, and when Dean braced his feet without meaning to, Sam lifted him bodily and pushed him up against the wall.

Released just enough to get his breath back, words tumbled. "_Sam what the fuck are you_ - !"

Sam clapped a hand over Dean's mouth in the same moment that Dean grabbed Sam's wrists, skin-on-skin contact, and Dean froze. The pulling stopped. It cut off so suddenly that he felt as if there was a recoil somewhere. The boys stood locked in place, staring at each other in wide-eyed amazement, startled by the suddenness of everything. There was just a stillness in the center, the eye of any hurricane, Sam momentarily eclipsing whatever was still visible about Dean.

The chain was still swinging, making an uneven _tik tik_ sound against the door.

Closing the circuit didn't work the same anymore; it never quite closed. It was just looping off and looking for somewhere to land, opposite charges crossing and bleeding off energy with no final payoff. Sam figured that out right about the time he felt his knees give because he was overloading. He didn't let go, not quite understanding what was happening but not willing to stop shielding Dean, dragging them both to the floor. He'd lock his hands around Dean's neck if he had to. Dean released Sam's wrists and cupped his face instead, watching Sam's eyes roll back in his head, feeling Sam grip his wrists in return. Nothing came in the door or tried to get in any other way, and Dean understood in his own way that whatever was at the door had nothing to do with whatever was pressing on Sam.

"Sam," he said, low and gruff, not caring what heard, "...tell me what's going on."

Sam's only response was to try and cut his circulation off.

Fuck it. They'd plow through whatever was at the door and leave it behind, then come back for their stuff in the daylight. He tried to drag Sam to his feet, and they ended up in a tangle on the floor. When he could get them both up, there was nothing telling him they shouldn't just open the door. Nothing blocked them or tried to touch him, and with Sam leaning on him he got one hand on the knob and wrenched the door open without incident. Sam stumbled with him across the parking lot but kept up, hand locked around one of Dean's wrists, then locked around both when Dean tried to get him into the car.

"You've gotta let go of me," Dean said.

"I can't," Sam said, the words slurred.

"Sam, goddamnit, you have to," Dean said. "We can't get out of here unless you do."

"It'll see you," Sam said, and Dean realized what was happening, realized that he was the problem and that Sam was only in trouble because he was protecting him.

It made him cold. It made him want to slam his own head against the nearest surface.

"Sammy," he said, trying for reason, "I don't think it can see me now. If we get out of here, it won't see me. C'mon, Sam. We'll run, I promise."

Sam wavered, but Dean still had to pry his fingers loose.

-I-

When Sam awoke, it was only midmorning from what he could tell. The sun was only partly up but it was getting warm. He wasn't sure what had happened for a moment, and he didn't feel like anything much had gone on. He sat up and glanced around, realizing he was in the car and Dean wasn't.

He craned his head around, seeing they were parked off to one side of a diner. It all came back to him around then, but so did Dean.

"Dude, coffee."

Sam stared at him as if he'd said something profane, but he took the offered cup.

Dean came around and got in the car, staring out the windshield. "You know what?" he said with mock gravity. "Call me crazy, but I think we're being chased."

"You got that feeling too?" Sam said.

"I'm not sure I even wanna know what that was," Dean said.

"Then I guess it wasn't the faces-in-the-dark thing," Sam said.

"No. Compared to whatever just tried to _unravel_ me, the face was just a warning."

"Who'd wanna warn us?" Sam said.

Dean sighed, raising a hand to drop it on Sam's shoulder but stopping short. He couldn't. He wasn't sure what he'd _done_.

"How did you know?" Dean said. "How to hide us. How did you _know_?"

Sam looked at him, eyes a bloodshot blue, and he seemed so much _dimmer_ than Dean had thought, easy enough to look at now in the morning light.

"Jesus, Sam," he said.

-I-


	4. Chapter 3

**Woven, 3?**  
(c)2006 b stearns 

**a/n:** there is no crematorium, past or present, in Fort Morgan, Colorado. No besmirchment of Fort Morganians intended. I'm sure they dispose of their dead _just fine_.

* * *

-I- 

Nothing seemed changed when they returned to the motel room. Not with the room itself, anyway.

Sam allowed himself a little confusion over why he didn't have a headache for the first time in weeks. The absence of it seemed more of a shock than the nonstop pain. It occurred to him that accidentally siphoning off some sort of extra charge that had been building along the parts of Dean he'd missed was granting him a reprieve even though it hadn't felt like one at the time.

The EMF meter was making low, electronic wailing noises as Dean walked the room with it. There was nothing there with them now, but there'd been something. Dean was totally, really, absolutely not not not talking about whatever had gone on with the Unlocker of Doors. It wasn't going to happen again. Assuming anything had actually happened. Which it hadn't, if Sam was asking, which he damn well better not.

"I didn't salt the door," Sam said. "After everything we've been through lately, I didn't...it's the most basic thing. _Fuck_."

"Yeah, this is your fault," Dean said. "Get all drunk and forget to salt the door, that's my Sam. Would you knock it off?"

"We're clumsy," Sam said, anger rising in his voice for once. "This isn't _like us_, Dean."

"We haven't been _like us_ ever, Sam," Dean threw back. "There is no 'like us'. We change to match whatever situation we run into. You changed when you went away to school, you're different again now, you're always changing. I'm whoever anybody wants me to be. So don't say _like us_." He remembered the revenant saying _no one knows you, eldest _and he hated that it was the thing that stuck with him most.

Sam found himself actually leaning away a little at the vehemence and the uncharacteristic...honesty, if nothing else. It may not have been altogether true, but it was honest. "Fine," he said, the anger gone as quickly as it had come.

Dean grabbed the laptop and booted it, turning his back to Sam as he sat on the bed furthest from the door. He was more embarrassed than angry, but he was accustomed to showing each the same way since they weren't necessarily that different. He'd had enough time to think about what they'd run into earlier that morning while he watched Sam try to come back around, and his current search led him further down those same paths.

He could hear Sam doing pushups on the floor behind him, and found himself subconsciously counting as he tapped the keyboard. Thralls. They had to have been Thralls. That was how he knew the thing unlocking the door wasn't the same as what had been staring at him in the dark. Thralls gathered when there was something they couldn't resist. They were harmless and came in many shapes and sizes, and his brand were likely just the first to catch up to them. He hadn't heard of them in years - they usually hung around the soon-to-be dead or the newly born, attracted by an emerging soul. They kept to the realm between life and death until summoned or until they just coudn't resist something.

He couldn't even make an internal joke about being irresistable. Nine, ten, eleven.

Now that he was fairly sure of what they were, he didn't need to shoot at them anymore.

He wanted to ask Sam about it, because Sam knew more about it than he did - Sam had more of a sense of _self_ than he did, Sam had a better grasp on what had really gone down. Sam was built to feel and comprehend these things better, or maybe just only where Dean was concerned. Why he was so dead against acknowledging it much less talking about any of it out loud, he didn't know or care. It was another impulse that he felt was wisest just to follow for now. He couldn't handle that Sam might be the only thing to save him, at his own expense, if he was really coming loose again. Twenty two, twenty three, twenty four.

Something had seen him, seen enough of him to run him through its fingers from the other side of a door. Sam'd had...standing permission of a sort, to do what he'd done; Sam had been respectful and had belonged. Sam had been comfortable and welcome, and he couldn't even think hard about that. The uninvited guest had been cold and calculating but had not been _evil_. That was maybe the hardest thing to take. It had only felt like it was feeding, like any predator. Cheetahs weren't evil when they brought

down an antelope, they were just doing what they were made to do.

Being an antelope sucked.

Sam could probably seal him up the rest of the way.

It was a hard, hard thing to ask. So for now he'd suck it up and they'd move quick enough to keep it from being an issue. He knew they could. They'd have to. It would be fine. Thirty eight, thirty nine, forty.

The other option was to figure out what the hell it was and kill it before it sucked him dry. Vampire...no, not the right behavior or approach. He wasn't open; Sam had had to make contact to get the kind of backlash he had. He was just...condensating soul energy on the outside. Leaving trails, like Sam had said. He had to learn to cover his tracks until they figured out how to shut him down.

Instead of searching for history, he started by adding first the word _scandal _and then _desecration _because that was always amusing. Fifty two, fifty three, fifty four. Showoff. _Fort Morgan Colorado + improper burial._

"Oh, paydirt," Dean said. "And all without talking to the locals." He turned himself around on the bed and turned the laptop toward Sam. "Read, Grasshopper."

Sam made a face at the smugness in his tone but stood, having barely broken a sweat. He took the laptop and sat on the other bed, adjusting the monitor to keep the light from the windows from throwing a glare. _14 Bodies Found: Local crematorium continued to operate despite lack of a 'working oven'. _Seventeen different articles popped up in the search, beginning with the discovery of a shallow grave that was a little too shallow: someone's dog brought home several human fingers. Then, detailing the progression of a search by local law enforcement and volunteers. Fourteen bodies had been found, whole and in parts, scattered around the grounds of the crematorium and the woods behind. If there were others, no one was quite sure. Most had been buried in an attempt at some sort of decorum, the graves marked with small handwoven wreaths of local dried flowers. Homemade funerals. _Change Of Heart: 'cremation a sin', owners say. _

Some had not made it to burial and had been propped in the garage when the owners _ran out of room_.

They hadn't meant 'any harm', according to the articles; they'd run the place for years, servicing twelve local funeral homes. Then they'd decided it wasn't right to keep reducing the paying public to ash and fragments. But instead of selling the business, they'd taken it upon themselves to make other choices for their customers. Like handing over small boxes of fireplace ashes instead of actual cremains.

Indictment of the owners, litigation, then silence. The place had been turned upside down, then shut down. Sam could see there'd been a struggle to keep it local; it was a good scandal, the type that a culture fascinated with death could ogle without shame.

"This just happened last year," Sam said finally. "Like that one in Georgia, in '02. That one was all over the news. There were hundreds of bodies in the woods, jammed into storage sheds, tossed into the pond out back, and they gave people urns with, like, concrete powder in them and said it was grandma. But this one...it wasn't laziness. They buried the people, or tried to. It's still...wrong, but they didn't just toss them in the woods."

"The folks didn't wanna be buried, though," Dean said. "The families backed out of having the remains cremated anywhere else and had proper burials done in cemeteries. So we've got all these people who didn't get the send-off they asked for. Rotting in the ground. Sitting in storage in the garage. That's fuckin' crazy."

"So...what? They're mad because they were buried, so they're cremating everybody they run across by drawing lightning?" Sam said. "C'mon."

"No, don't jump so far," Dean said. "Think about it. How many times have we run across a group of spirits, instead of just one or two?"

"Okay," Sam said, "Assuming the lights are the people who were buried instead of cremated. Would they be hanging around together? Why wouldn't they just go on?"

"After being forced to play tea party in a garage for who knows how long?" Dean said. "Some people are pretty serious about how they go. It said fourteen were _found_. There could be others, and a lot of people don't want to poke at the ashes they were given. They just call it done and put 'em on the mantel or in the closet, or do some scattering, or get a nice little vault. Not everybody's gonna ask whether what they got is really their dearly departed dad."

Sam nodded. "It's too hard," he said. "It's like going through the loss all over again. They don't say exactly when the cremations stopped or the oven stopped working. They only said they took the breakdown as a 'sign'."

"I changed my mind," Dean said. "When I go, don't have me cremated. Or maybe just do it yourself. A nice Viking funeral."

"I know you think that's funny," Sam said without looking up, "But it's not. There are a lot of days I feel like setting you on fire, but don't joke about dying anymore."

"Don't be so sensitive, Sam," Dean said, and he wasn't looking up either. "There's this chick in the Netherlands or somewhere that actually dips corpses in liquid nitrogen, then shatters your ass all over the place and freeze-dries you. Then you get planted with a tree. I fuckin' love that. I'll let you pick the tree."

Sam clicked the laptop shut with very calm hands.

"It's not like I'm asking you to freeze my head," Dean said. "Go all Walt Disney on your ass or anything. Make you carry it around in a lunchbox like Dahmer. See if you can find me a nice Zeppelin lunchbox."

Sam got up and left the room, movements stiff and abrupt with anger, closing the door behind softly in counterpoint.

Dean cursed softly to himself, knowing he should occasionally shut up but not wanting to. Sam never used to be so _touchy_ except for a while during puberty. It wasn't like they were going to live forever. Death was part of their everyday lives, and Dean had accepted that right up front.

He let it go for a moment, then sighed and got up to go chase his brother.

When he opened the door, Sam was nowhere in sight, so he stalled by checking the weather. Partly cloudy. Sam had probably gone to get a _soda_, as he liked to claim he was doing when he had no other lameass excuse to make himself scarce. It wasn't soda anyway, it was pop, dammit, and being on the west coast for four years didn't give him license to forget he was from the midwest. Well, sort of. They were mostly from everywhere.

Everywhere, all the time.

There'd been that one space of time, when he and Sam were almost uncontrollable, and only the most basic and ingrained urge to obey their father kept them from running completely wild. They were similar in their ironic detachment from the world for awhile, playmates on the same level. The age difference had begun to lose its importance, and Sam had become perilously close to being an equal. He could never stop feeling a responsibility to keep Sam out of harm's way, but for almost two years before Sam left for college, there had been a long, insane camaraderie. Lord of the Flies without pig's heads on sticks. Sam had openly worshiped him, occasionally cast as the faithful sidekick, but he was more of a co-conspirator during the worst of it. Months had trailed on and Dean had known Sam didn't want that life anymore, that the constant moving made him restless for something else, as contradictory as that seemed. He knew it but didn't want to acknowledge it or even let Sam talk about it. Sam would never be older than his teens, the lunacy would go on forever, and he would never lose his best friend.

He had frozen himself in that one best, brightest place, never getting past it. Never growing past it. In case it happened again.

It had started as an assigned duty; watching out for Sam. But after awhile to call it duty felt cold and sterile. It was never _duty_ or work or a requirement, to love Sam. Sam had never dragged him down or been a source of resentment when he'd needed to learn to tie his shoes or tell time or couldn't reach the easiest things. Sam was a gift, and when he'd finally _caught up_ and kept up, the life they'd led became sheer _freedom_.

He so wanted that back.

It was never going to happen.

He took a step out onto the gravel, staring off to his left. He wasn't sure if he could stand being the one out of step forever, but more than that, it would be impossible to do without even just this, this stumbling around with his only genuine claim to _grace_.

"You don't have to taunt me to get me to tell you how much you mean to me," Sam said from his right.

Startled, Dean turned to look at Sam, then made an impatient gesture. "Jesus. You're so _in touch_ with yourself, Sam. Use a tissue."

"And you don't have to insult me to tell me how much I mean to you," Sam said. "So shut up. Except, you know. Keep talking. Just not out your ass, for maybe a whole five minutes at a time."

Sam walked away, headed down the road to the mini-mart, but there was nothing defeated in the way he did it. Dean shook his head, then found himself trying not to laugh. "Hey, what'd you have to go and grow up for? Getting all _mature_ on me. Loser."

"Keep trying, Dean," Sam called over his shoulder. "You can do it."

-I-

Later that afternoon, when Sam had given them both enough space to recharge and lose the urge to snap, they went looking for the Holy Valley Crematorium. The concrete block building was low and long, and had probably begun to show signs of age before it was boarded up. It was painted a utilitarian beige that was flaking for years before the doors had been chained, but it still didn't look forbidding. Not with the loops and scrawls of grafitti proclaiming territorial dominance in seven colors on the side they could see.

"Why don't they just piss on everything like the rest of the animal kingdom does?" Dean said.

The grass had already grown enough in a year to reclaim a good part of the walkway leading to the main entrance, and whatever had passed for landscaping had run wild, azaleas tipping over under their own flowers, Korean boxwood sending shoots skyward and ruining their carefully square-cut configurations. The place was set back far enough from the road and far enough from any of the surrounding businesses that breaking and entering in daylight wasn't much of a risk.

Dean smirked at the 'no trespassing' signs and poked at one with the cutters he'd brought. They headed around to the rear of the building, following the paved turnaround that countless hearses had traversed. There was a halfassed loading dock in the back, the doors chained a little less securely than the front. The chain was already rusting. Dean snapped it and Sam caught it, and they pulled the doors closed behind as they let themselves in.

Disappointing.

It was dim because the windows were boarded up, and dusty as hell, but the off white linoleum was still intact and the place had been cleared out otherwise. Clinical and serene, no shades of charnelhouse horror, just an abandoned building with a past that was no longer visible. The last third of the building was offset slightly and partitioned off with a cinderblock wall; the oven had its own chamber. When they rounded the corner with flashlights at the ready, they found it still intact but disconnected from the chimney and filters that had kept it within EPA guidelines. A huge stone and metal construct with a single metal grate opening in the front.

"Y'know, they come computerized now," Dean said. "This is an antique. Bet it could still get up to a good 1800 degrees or so. Kinda...looks like a pizza oven."

Sam went around the side to look at it, and Dean opened the door and poked the flashlight inside. There was a grating inside, cut into the stone, a way of catching remains.

Dean ran a finger along one of the scallop-edged surfaces and rubbed the residue between thumb and forefinger, thinking about how everything you touched left a part behind.

"You didn't," Sam said, shining his flashlight on him.

"Sam," Dean said, "I've been splattered with zombies and all kinds of corpse-crap over the years. This is nothing. It's not like I'm gonna put it in my coffee or snort it off a mirror."

He could hear Sam trying not to laugh, and he wondered why he even bothered trying to hide it at all.

"There's nothing here," Sam said. "Garage?"

They went out the back without trying to fasten the chain back into place. The garage had been torn down.

They went back to the motel to shower and eat and set an alarm clock for dusk, because there was no better time to visit the remainder of the sites where lightning had struck previously. The _ignis_ didn't care about the crematorium and apparently not about the cemetery where its last dissatisfied customers had been laid to unrest; they were showing up to randomly chase anyone wandering the roads on foot.

Sam was against it because he thought it was just a way of offering themselves as bait. For a lot of things.

He didn't know what Dean knew, and Dean was partial to keeping it that way.

"Then just stay here," Dean said, knowing he was being a bastard. He cared about it but not enough to stop.

"Whatever that was this morning will be able to find us in the open just as well as it found us here," Sam said.

"You mean me," Dean said, barely able to keep his eyes open. "It's not looking for you, Sam."

"Yeah," Sam said. "Whatever looks for you is gonna find me."

Dean rolled over above the covers so that he was facing Sam, keeping his eyes closed. No point arguing. He blamed it on being tired.

-I-


	5. Chapter 4

**Woven, 4**  
(c)2006 b stearns  
Spoilers: are random and encompass the season up to _Scarecrow. _  
Author: is random in her behavior and craves a _Twinkie_.

* * *

-I-

While there was enough light left, Dean left Sam in the room and walked over to the mini-mart to get a large container of talcum powder and get out of Sam's immediate space for a minute.

Sam had always liked time to himself, where Dean would have preferred to chew glass rather than be alone. He knew he had to give Sam space occasionally to keep him from going completely nuts but he'd always been so bad at it. They'd been breathing the same air 24/7 since he'd gone to get Sam from Stanford, and if that wasn't bad enough, now the encroachment was more than physical.

Where was Sam supposed to run?

Had his heart given out like it was meant to, his brother and father would have been hurt but would have gone on, similarly determined to do whatever was necessary. They didn't get along with each other because they were _just alike_. Dean was odd man out in that equation and had known it the moment Sam and John had first really clashed.

Leaving Sam behind had occurred to Dean, leaving before he accidentally killed - or was left some other way by - the only thing he'd ever done right. That was crazy bullshit, and he knew it, but he couldn't think of another way to save Sam from himself. Sam wasn't going to hesitate to try and hide Dean from whatever came knocking. And there was a sudden, high price for that hiding that was Sam's only to pay. What did _Sam_ get, for saving him?

More of the same.

He hated himself for _not being able_ to do without Sam.

Before they left the motel, Dean coated parts of the floor - particularly just inside the door - and several surfaces with talcum powder and left the 'do not disturb' sign on the outside of the door. They'd done it a couple of times to see if anything interesting would leave messages - but they'd only done it in places where they knew something was getting in and had something to say. Never one of their own motel rooms. What Dean didn't tell Sam was that ashes worked better for getting results from the dead and that he and John had experimented with just that a few times while Sam was away. Not with fireplace ashes, either.

Ah, the things he'd wanted to tell Sam but hadn't.

If they kept moving, maybe he wouldn't pool in one place in constantly spreading circles. Maybe he would just keep leaving a trail the stupid thing had to follow, and maybe he'd get it out in the open and step on it. Maybe Sam wouldn't have to try and shield him. Maybe monkeys would fly out of his ass.

Flashlights: check. EMF meter, guns, salt, lighter fluid just in case, map of the blast sites. Dean locked the door of the motel room and didn't look back, but Sam paused to draw a pentacle in holy water and say something Dean didn't need to hear.

It was fully dark by the time they'd decided on a route.

"It's brilliant, trying to find these places in the dark," Sam said.

"I know," Dean said with the same amount of sarcasm. "I thought of it myself."

They were hyperalert, waiting on two fronts. Something ahead and something behind, both unknown and threatening.

Dean knew if the damn frogs would shut up, he could think better. Only one other spot had been an asphalt hit; the other two they'd seen so far were open, grassy areas. A park, a field. And still, the same thing: glass. The soil and rock beneath the scorched and blasted vegetation had melted to glass, angular and uneven, thrown into chunks around the point of impact. Dean dug a thumb sized piece out of the site in the field and tucked it away. They shone their flashlights on it and checked the area immediately around. Sam kept checking the uniformly cloudy sky and swiveling his entire body around to keep track of their surroundings. Their attention was not entirely on what they were doing, and Dean knew it was going to cause them to miss something.

"Cut it out," Dean said.

"What."

"The intrepid thing," Dean said, eyes still on the ground. "Just chill."

Sam had a brief and violent mental image of whacking Dean with his flashlight. Not a vision, thankfully, but it might as well have been. He couldn't beat sense into him, though, so he settled for scolding. "You know, it's not like there's much out here to warn us if that thing catches up," Sam said. "It's got nothing to unlock out here but you."

"You're not gonna see it, either," Dean said, continuing to train his flashlight on the ground. "So, help me look for evidence and quit waiting for the other shoe to drop."

"You have to start taking this seriously," Sam said.

"You're doing it for both of us," Dean said, walking further away. "I got news for you, Sam. We could bite it in a really stupid, random car accident tomorrow. Ironic, but possible. We don't have seatbelts."

"I'm not talking about the lights, or the thing that chased us out last night," Sam said, clicking his flashlight off. "And you know it. Before it was just regular people staring at you because you were kind of open. Now it's everything else."

"Good," Dean said. "Then we can just sit around and wait for shit to come find us, instead of having to hunt for it. Sit on a porch somewhere and pick things off as they come into the yard."

"Aren't you curious?" Sam said, remaining in place as Dean moved further away. "About how it really happened in the first place, about how it works?"

"No," Dean said, and the flat finality to his voice told Sam he really was listening. He was still examining the ground, sweeping the faint cone of light in even strokes in front of himself and holding the EMF meter loosely in his other hand.

"We're not gonna get to the bottom of it or keep it from doing us in if we don't get the facts out," Sam said, not sure why he was pushing it right then. "This isn't one of the times you need to be a hardass, Dean."

"Shut up," Dean said, voice lowered to a defensive growl in response to being told what this was a time for. "Like any of this is fixable. I don't have _words_ for this, Sam."

"Then just show me," Sam said.

Dean stopped cold.

Sam stared at Dean's back and felt an abstract moment of horror at how the words had come out, because he'd meant to say something like them but nothing like them at all. It was a bigger line to cross than the one he'd crossed in the car that night in Ellensburg, because this was _benevolence aforethought_ rather than a reaction to circumstance. It was one thing to do something out of necessity and another to ask to do it again. He was more horrified at what angle of motivation the words stemmed from than what reaction they might get. He wanted something back that no one was ever meant to have.

He was saved by an audible _snap_ and the sight of a fist-sized whirl of faint green light popping into existence at face height hundreds of yards off to their right. The EMF meter didn't react because it was too far away. They tracked it with their eyes as it wavered in place for several seconds and winked out. Before either could speak, it popped up again, closer, leaving a dim trail like a giant firefly. A second snapped on in a smear of washed-out orange, and the two passed each other and winked out again.

Dean clicked his flashlight off, and Sam was left with pinpoints of distant sodium vapor streetlights and the green-red-yellow flash of the EMF meter to occupy his dark-adapted eyes. The frogs had stopped singing, and there was nothing but his own breathing and the barking of a dog miles away. He thought about the incredibly untrue adage about lightning not striking twice and then realized there was no way they should hang around if an actual gathering was underway. It was possible they were drawing the gathering just by being who they were. The EMF meter began to squeal when something the color and size of a robin's egg flashed briefly above their heads, only yards off to the left. Dean walked backwards until he was even with Sam. It was silent and dark for several seconds. Then they both felt the hair on the napes of their necks rise, and the _snap_ was louder and closer when numerous lights popped on directly above them, throwing their shadows back across the scorched grass and reflecting off the glass crater.

"Sonofabitch!" Dean shouted, and shoved Sam back toward the road. They sprinted without looking back, waiting for the sudden rush of heat they imagined might come with having the water content of their bodies turned to steam. Dean was thinking about how much electrocution _sucked_.

They stopped at the car and turned, waiting. The lights were gone. In any case, they could get in the car and the tires would ground them if the sky decided to shake hands with the ground, as Dean had put it.

"They're generating a charge," Sam said, out of breath, turning his flashlight back on and balancing it on the roof of the car. "They're just trying to get attention, from anyone they can, whether they're seen or not."

"Bullshit," Dean said, beginning to shift from foot to foot. "If it's those people, they're getting revenge for the way things went down. That's a lot more than a cry for help, Sam."

"Stuff might not look or feel the same after you're dead," Sam said, tone caustic. "Not everything knows what it's doing. They probably don't even realize - "

"Where the fuck is all this pacifist, namby-pamby, 'look on the bright side' crap coming from?" Dean said, cutting him off. "Where the hell did you ever get the idea that anything is ever good, Sam?"

"From you," Sam said softly.

Dean froze the same way he had earlier, startled into staring at him with a baffled severity. Sam just stood there, unassuming, hands in jacket pockets, looking older than Dean liked in the white half-light. Perfectly easy to look at, no longer his binary or stuck with the soulstuff he cast off. At least, not for the moment.

"I've only had the chance to look at things like that because you've never let anything pull me down," Sam said. "You've always taken the brunt of everything. Me and dad fighting, or whatever we were hunting, or some of the stupid shit I could have learned the hard way."

"Now you're accusing me of sheltering you," Dean said, defaulting to gruffness in the absence of anything else he could dredge up.

Rather than fall back on one of his standard reactions, Sam leaned forward and grabbed Dean with one hand, forcing him to hold still. "Do I look sheltered to you?" he said, voice lowered to a challenge. "I only have the luxury of being who and how I want to be because of you. So if you don't like it, you only have yourself to blame."

Dean didn't shake him off, but he didn't look at him, either. "Just because we've found them doesn't mean we don't have to look at the rest of the sites," he said finally, his voice so low that Sam had to lean in to hear the words.

-I-

There it was: the house from the article he'd been folding and unfolding for the last couple of days. It was slightly offset from the rest of the neighborhood, likely one of the first homes built before a housing boom had brought the surrounding development. It was an unassuming, standard ranch style house, frame siding painted an off white, sporting the same composition shingle roof the rest of the neighborhood did. Its vacancy was obvious even from a distance. They sat in the car and looked at the dark, curtainless windows and the 'for sale' sign.

"It's the first one," Sam said. "The first incident. Family was home, sitting around the table, boom. No witnesses. Every appliance in the place blew, the wiring all burned, and nothing else was scorched but the doors and windows."

"So, no one to tell us what really happened in there," Dean said. "Convenient."

"Just the neighbors seeing the flash and hearing the explosion," Sam said. "And calling in the fire." He gestured toward the trees to the north, where lights from the next nearest house could be seen, amber and warm, promising someone that they were _home_ and _safe_.

"Anybody related to the tea partiers at the crematorium?" Dean said.

"Not that I could find," Sam said.

"I love weird, random shit," Dean said. "House looks...completely abandoned."

Dean had that look on his face again, that weird-thoughtful half-conscious thing he did when something interested him to the point where he forgot to keep his front up. Sam had taken careful note because they weren't the same as they had been before he'd left for school. Back then there were two versions of Dean-without-the-mask. The first was sparkling, giddy joy and the second was mischief. The second had morphed into a predatory gleam sometime in the last four years. He was wearing the second then, and Sam knew they were going in and that Dean was going to burn this one. He found that he didn't mind because it would give Dean something to do that belonged just to him.

Dean turned the Impala around and parked a block down, and they walked, keeping an eye out for late strollers. Not that there would be any; no one seemed hot on walking around this place anymore. But it wouldn't do to be arrested over this.

It was a long, straight gravel drive up to the house, and they cut across the wide expanse of front lawn to stand on the patio by the front door. There were enough trees between them and the road to make them brave enough to ignore the back door. Three cement steps with a handrail led up to the unadorned door. Someone had left a handful of carnations that had long since dried on the steps. They cupped their hands around their faces to look in the front windows and see that there was nothing left but newspapers and bubble wrap from the removal of the estate.

Dean jimmied the lock easily - there was no deadbolt - and swung the door open to go in. He paused, foot still raised. He could keep going if he really wanted to, but it didn't seem like a good idea.

"Dean," Sam said from behind him. There was no question in it, just a statement left open for any response.

Dean stepped back and ushered Sam ahead of him. Sam looked at him appraisingly for a moment, letting him know he could see something was going on, but he stepped past.

"It doesn't want me," Dean said.

Sam turned back to look at him with open alarm on his face. Rather than just making some excuse to wander around the yard or grouching that he didn't want to go inside, Dean was coming right out with what he knew. He couldn't pretend to not understand what Dean meant. He'd never doubted that houses had souls; Dean had convinced him of that in a million small unspoken ways over the years in the same way that Sam had taught Dean that trees did too. Not once had he had a problem with walking into anything, anywhere, so whatever it was that was stopping him now wasn't some sort of apprehension about what was inside.

The house in Lawrence had wanted them both back so badly, but Dean had not wanted to go, and Sam thought he finally kind of understood why. Dean might have long since burned the house in Lawrence and listened to it scream in silent anguish as he did, had it not been for the families it continued to house. Even though their mother had finally left it for good, Sam doubted Dean would have the heart to eradicate the last - first and last, for Sam - place they'd seen that face in person.

"Go on in," Dean said, nodding Sam forward, and he looked a little chagrined.

Sam let it pass and stepped into the house, looking around. He glanced back at Dean.

"It's nothing," Dean said. "Let me know if you find anything."

Sam watched him jump from the stairs and head around to the side of the house. He shook his head a little, thinking they'd spent some weird evenings together but that this one was beating all. He walked from room to room, trying not to focus on whose room each might have been. Butterflies painted around the window of the smaller room in the back screamed _little girl lived here_ and he cringed. There was no sign of scorching except around the frames of the doors and windows, which was just damn odd, like something had been trying for a way out. No sulfur, no ash, no panic in the air. It had all happened so fast that no one had even left an imprint behind. Sam no longer questioned himself about the fact that he felt imprints from whatever emotion had last been in a room. Nothing _evil_ had been there, just some sort of tragic mistake. Explaining how he knew it, even to himself, was a waste of time anymore.

_snap_

Sam's ears were suddenly ringing so loudly that he couldn't understand how what he was hearing wasn't externally audible. There was a buildup of something, and it sounded much like when you first turn on a really old TV set; that high-whine, almost inaudible warming up of electricity and glass and electronics. He stared around, trying to pinpoint the direction it was coming from, but he couldn't.

"Hey, Dean!" he called.

When Dean didn't answer, he took off for the back door, knowing and knowing and knowing he had to get to Dean before the pitch either rose or whatever was making his skin crawl with energy snapped to life all the way. The pressure was settling in his sinuses and humming along the bridge of his nose, and all the fine hairs along his arms and the nape of his neck rose in response.

Positive charge.

--

One block over, a couple looked up from their TV to watch the top left corner of their livingroom picture window _crack _at the pressure. A single thin shard of cold light glinted from the new angle of the glass.

--

Sam felt every step across the linoleum, frantic hands unlocking the solid wood door, and had he slammed it open any harder he could have taken it off its hinges. He nearly skidded to a stop on the back patio at what he saw.

There was a ring of lights, almost Christmas-like in their variation, surrounding Dean.

Dean stood in the center, looking trapped, hands held up at shoulder height, palms out.

Sam thought, _we should have known better_ and _we drew them_.

Drawn by what should never be: a mortal throwing off the surly bonds of life and limb to show what spun beneath. They were all meant to be wrapped and held down. Dean was still just open enough to be a scream in a library and fireworks at a funeral. _Here I am, look at me, lose your mind. _A soul held in check was the same as any candle, purposeful and welcome and contained; let loose, there was a forest fire, and nothing to stop the escalation as long as there was something to consume.

"Dean," Sam said, taking a step toward Dean and then reeling backwards when something that felt like an electric-fence level of shock hit him. The pressure was _insane_ and he had one crazy moment of wondering if they'd get the bends from trying to remain in an atmosphere that was almost too heavy to breathe. Something familiar was building behind his eyes, and as he tried to get his balance again by grabbing the doorway behind him, he realized what it was, too late, something fraying and snapping, something of himself giving in the form of...stitches. Dean was sinking to his knees on the grass with a stunned look of disbelief on his face and it was the last clear thing Sam was able to see when something threw him against the side of the house.

His eyes were closed, but it was there all the same. When he opened his eyes again, it wasn't sight, not the way he knew it, but he couldn't see anything else. He was blind with light that would never have been visible to anyone but him.

Dean.

His soul was singing _itself_, blunt and brilliant, overwhelming and overwhelmed as he _ascended_ yet stayed the same, both earthbound and divine by definition. He was burning without flame, and Sam finally realized that souls burned away just the same as flesh did; anyone he'd loved or wanted to love that suffered an oxygen-borne conflagration had still passed on once the threads holding them to life were severed, once they'd reached a limit. Dean was nothing _but_ white flame that couldn't truly burn in the common sense. And there was nothing to stop him.

_"No!"_ Sam screamed, pinned in place like a butterfly in any collection and trying to reach and already too late. He hadn't been there the first time Dean had forcibly taken his own hinges off, but he knew he was looking at it then, Dean with his hinges prying off because he couldn't stop it, because the pressure from whatever was surrounding him was reacting with whatever he was still giving off by accident.

There would be no lightning.

Dean was the lightning.

When everything _gave _this time there was nothing to contain it. The shockwave spun out unseen, shattering windows, knocking Sam the rest of the way to the ground.

Sam's last conscious thought was that Dean was everywhere and nowhere and he would never be able to fold him up again.

-I-


	6. Chapter 5

**Woven,** 5  
(c)2006 gekizetsu  
**Warnings:** cursing and unabashed angst.

* * *

-I- 

John Winchester startled awake and stared at the ceiling of his motel room somewhere in the midwest, unsure of what had tripped his wires. He sat up and checked the corners without turning the lights on, knowing his eyes were already adjusted to the dark.

Something was _wrong._

He waited - for anything that would give him an idea about what the trouble was. It was no nightmare. The feeling should have tapered off the longer he was awake, if that had been the case. He rose to go to the door, looking outside for a moment and finding nothing that would usually cause concern.

He checked his phone messages. Nothing.

It occurred to him that he had no idea where his boys were. He couldn't quite remember the last thing he'd said to either of them that wasn't an order or a direction, and that was suddenly very important.

He was panicking. He hadn't gotten enough sleep, and he was imagining things. That was all. He'd been dreaming and just didn't remember it. If he ordered his thoughts and emotions, it would fade into the background again and things would be fine.

He thumbed through the numbers in the phone's memory anyway, lingering over Sam's number and then Dean's. There would be questions. They'd recognize his number and get rattled, and for all he knew he'd be blowing their cover in something or giving their position away by causing a phone to ring. He'd taught them to turn their phones off if they were in a situation, but then again, even he had to admit situations were often unplanned.

He flipped the phone shut.

He'd know - he'd _know_ - if one of his boys was dead. He'd know if he lost them, one or both. He never questioned that. There was no point. It didn't matter what the mechanics of it were, or whether it was simply because he was their father. There was nothing to know.

He continued to stand and hold the closed phone as if he hadn't made up his mind. It wasn't like him, and he was conscious of it.

They could take care of themselves and each other. Better, now, than he ever could have.

-I-

Sam figured things were like this:

Whatever had been messing with them at the door the night before had managed to catch hold of Dean's edges enough to loosen him a little; and it wasn't like his shoelaces were tied that well to begin with.

That didn't help him now.

His first thoughts when he was conscious again were that he should have been more uncomfortable than he was, and that he was outside. He groped outwards to get his bearings and his hand clapped against the slick, cool vinyl siding of the house he lay next to, shoulder crushing a section of hostas. A memory broke free of Dean slamming a hand against the siding just outside a motel door, so much struggle in his voice when he said _Stay inside, Sam_. Everything was green-smelling earthy dark and his skin tingled like he was standing under high voltage wires in the rain.

_Stay inside, Sam._

He finally got it all to click into place. He rolled to a sitting position, stunned and trying to get his bearings in the dark, eyes focusing on the streetlights. The yard was empty and he had one terrible moment of thinking Dean had blown apart in the most physical of senses rather than unraveling internally like he had before. He knew better than that just by being awake a moment longer and letting things settle. The long-ringing bell of _Dean_ played on somewhere near the street, just tolerable from that distance.

The lights had zeroed in on Dean and pulled him apart, and probably hadn't even realized it or meant to for all he could tell.

That was all well and good and he really didn't give a fuck at the moment because he couldn't see Dean. Dean would never have simply walked away from him and left him unconscious on the ground - not if he was himself, anyway. Nothing smelled of ozone or like there'd been anything he could pin down to an electrical discharge. His insides clenched all the way into his throat at the idea that Dean might not be Dean anymore and that he might find one last great fulgurite in the shape of his brother on the road.

He could get up; he had to get up.

He'd just referred to Dean as a bell in his head but he felt like maybe he was one, too, because as he climbed to his feet he was pretty sure his entire skeleton had become a tuning fork, struck into giving off his own paticular tone whether he wanted to or not.

He didn't call for Dean. He didn't have to, and he doubted Dean would answer. Dean was all over him, and the grass, and plastered all over the side of the house. There was a point of origin still in effect nearby, and hopefully the supernova was done ejecting its shell because he wasn't sure he'd weather another event. He stumbled getting out of the side garden and ended up on his hands and knees in the grass, causing a shock to bones that seemed too sensitive and giving him a stronger sense of Dean. When he stood, he wiped his hands on his jeans, flicking away dew and grass clippings. He walked straight for the spot where they'd parked, sinuses and chest cavity humming, knowing without question that he was headed in the right direction, still in the event horizon but moving through.

Dean was on the ground, legs tucked beneath him, slumped against the passenger side of the car. He looked like maybe that was as far as he could get and as close to safety as he could see. He wasn't as sun-bright as Sam expected, to any part of his vision. Sam decided he could probably mull over exactly why once he had enough time between himself and this one night. The closer Sam got, the more of a _ring_ he picked up, nothing to do with sound the way he understood it but all to do with the way his own bones rang and whether or not he could get any closer without managing to find himself in the same condition Dean was in.

That was it. Dean had put as much distance between them as he could once he realized that he might be too much for Sam to handle.

Grass became asphalt under Sam's feet but he could barely feel the difference. He nearly stumbled down the sloped curb because his depth preception seemed a little off. Dean didn't move but he wasn't still either, and Sam realized he was seeing the regular photons of the physical world with the faint after-image negatives of what ran beneath, just one step off, a bad printing job and all that Dean had left behind.

He managed to pass some sort of break-limit about ten feet from his brother because instead of an increase in pressure or his bones actually shaking apart, it vanished, and he made it to his knees close enough to see that the entire white of Dean's right eye was dark with blood. Dean was staring at something without blinking and didn't look at him.

Before he could say anything, Dean said, "Look."

There was someone standing at the edge of the trees to their right. At first Sam thought it was someone; then he realized it was a dark shape with only vaguely humanoid resemblance. The streetlights didn't quite reach it, and it didn't quite reflect the faint light anyway. It didn't come any closer.

"If we can both see it - " Sam said.

"Then it's not just one of us having some kind of meltdown or psychic fit," Dean said.

His voice was nearly unrecognizeable with a hoarse fatigue. It was still his voice but a step away like the rest of the world, no longer his alone.

"I think I may have brought a little attention down on us," Dean said with deliberate care, lowering his voice to a whisper and not bothering to lift his head from where it rested against the metal of the passenger door. "It's not whatever was at the door, though. Yet. You okay?"

"Yeah," Sam said, keeping his eyes trained on the figure. That close, he could tell something was happening but not what, so he tried to be still and listen.

"I think it's always been there," Dean said. "Standing there, guarding. Like an elemental or something, right? You can set those for specific tasks. Funny how we just noticed it."

"We've gotta get out of here," Sam said.

"They were just looking," Dean said as if he hadn't heard. "You were right, they're just looking for a way out. It's just lots of energy, trying to fix something that happened except they're not sure what happened anymore. I heard them."

Sam listened but couldn't keep looking at him. Dean wasn't bright again yet but he was burning the backs of Sam's eyes with an afterglow, some kind of radiation. "We'll figure out how to help them. After we figure out how to keep you from...coming apart."

"I was more than they could ignore, maybe," Dean said, eyes still fixed on the figure by the trees. "That's okay. We probably don't have to salt and burn anything, because that would be a whole cemetary of people, and hey, someone's gonna notice all those holes. Plus, my back - "

"Dean," Sam said. "You're not okay. Let's get out of here."

"I don't think you can put me back," Dean said.

"What?"

Dean tried to push himself up the side of the car and only succeeded once Sam hauled him upright by his jacket and then steadied him with one hand on the back of his neck. He leaned against the car and breathed, unaware that Sam was doing the same because he'd made contact and the resulting silence was overwhelming.

Not silence, though. Just the eye of the storm, again. Not keeping anything in or bleeding anything off, just holding still, one thin membrane against the tide. The circuit didn't close, and Sam had an idea that it should panic him but he couldn't dredge it up. It would do him no good. He really still had no experience at this but it was like so many other things they'd dealt with over their lives, and the hunter in him slid right into place to keep the panic down.

The house, the grass, himself. Some part of Dean was all over him and the immediate world, the trickle having become a rush no longer held back by any construct.

Dean was bleeding out.

"Oh, God," Sam said, too much wonder in his voice overshadowing anything else, because dread and fear wouldn't cover it, awe was all there was left once grief was transcended. He'd been dealing with ways to get past the baser emotions all his life, and it left the way open for a clearer view. Dean was standing there bleeding out in his hands and his edges were peeled so far back and away that stitches alone were out of the question, maybe patches, maybe a _whole new skin_ -

"Sam," Dean said, still not looking at him, weirdly calm and contained on the outside even though his innermost existence was anything but.

If Sam held on - if he just held on - then there was still a chance of sealing him back up. They always found a way, no matter what it was, and Sam knew all the pathways already. This was just a worst case scenario, they ran them all the time, with weapons and words. This close, Sam wasn't sure what was keeping Dean in his body at all.

"I've got you," Sam said, even though he was no longer completely sure what that meant.

Dean turned his head and looked at him finally, and Sam realized why he hadn't before. The last connection slid into place, held away until then because the rest of it had been involuntary. Dean made a purposeful connection, able to do so more than usual because he really was bleeding away, soulstuff and everything he was, and Sam felt it and felt that he was the only anchor.

He was the only thing still holding Dean in place, the last bit of weight on the string of a balloon long since free of any other constraint.

"No," Dean said softly. "Not really. I think I did it this time, kiddo."

It was the affection in Dean's voice and in his choice of words that was hardest to bear. Sam wanted to shake him, but he settled for tearing his gaze free long enough to check the darkness around them. There was a beat of time where everything looked normal; then there was a pulse of something past his eyes like he could see his own heartbeat behind them.

There was a moment of a hazy grayness and a sweep of a radar's compass, a brief illumination for everything he could never see. Figures darted past or stood, staring, faces indistinct as the world they stood in, suggestions only of people or shapes that could have once been living things in forms he'd have known. Then the dark and solid world was back, coloring inside the lines, the shapes of objects caught within their own confines.

"The world's full," Dean said. "We're walking through them all the time, Sam."

"They're..." Sam couldn't finish the sentence. Another pulse passed, the shadows in negative relief, full of indistinct faces and reaching hands, converging.

"If you let go of me I think it'll quit," Dean said. "For you, anyway."

The dead and the waiting and the inbetween, the ones who couldn't make themselves known or get between the worlds.

Sam opened the passenger side door without letting go of Dean, trying to steer him to get in the car. Dean resisted, looking back into the dark. "They're just lost," he said. "Figures, right?"

Sam looked again and the tide of faces turned toward them in smears of grayscale, the sub world, the one he looked into occasionally because it reached for him, but this one was stale and one step off. Forgotten. The tide at his back and himself as the only separation with the lighthouse in his hands.

-I-

They sat on opposite beds facing each other again like they had before, hands folded, Dean drifting away like he was unable to stay attached to his surroundings. He startled a little occasionally and Sam didn't need to ask to know the room had prior occupants that had never left. Dean had shrugged him off and now Sam sat and tried to keep his eyes away, his skull ringing with an aftershock of Dean-reverb.

The ride back had been so odd, Dean accidentally sweeping the dark and finally closing his eyes against it, Sam driving and trying not to ask, Dean flinching away from him when he reached out.

_Tell me what happened._

_It was just too much, Sam. I don't remember what went on between the yard and when you found me by the car._

He wanted to pace, to get Dean to say more, to try and talk his way out of not knowing what to do next. He wanted to hypothesize about what he could do to fix things, he wanted Dean to let him lay hands on him and find all the salvageable places between. But Dean had made him sit.

"Sooner or later everything that heard me will figure out where we are," Dean said, voice slow and measured with consideration.

"Then we'll keep moving," Sam said, eyes on his hands.

"Sam," Dean said. "I don't really understand this even though its happening to me...but I'm not...I can't..." He paused. "I think we're done, here. Whatever I did the first time, it was something people shouldn't do. I'm running out."

"I'll fix it," Sam said, and even to his own ears it was too wooden to hold any emotion. Dean wasn't just making an occasional comment, he was completely out in the open then, nothing left to hide behind. Anything he said now would be the truth as he understood it and there was no time for anything else. "I can. This is just something bigger."

"If you can't," Dean said, "Then you can probably pull things apart the rest of the way."

Sam's head jerked up before the sentence was complete. Dean was hard to look at, the light in his eyes fading, the bloodshot red and green of his right eye a startling reminder of damage to more than whatever animated them and defined them. "You can't ask me to do that," Sam whispered. "You can't want that, and you can't ask me to do something like that."

"I can't handle this, Sam," Dean said, holding his gaze. "Not open like this. Not all caught between. You know I wouldn't say shit like that to you if I thought..."

"Dean," Sam said, realizing he was losing it but unable to respond any other way.

"You're the only one who can," Dean said, voice and hands too steady, already resigned. "Sammy. The stitches won't hold. You can't keep patching me up. You've gotta seal me in permanently, or you've gotta..." He trailed off, finally realizing how much he was asking Sam to do. Kill him. It wasn't that he couldn't handle the idea; it was that he couldn't say it aloud to Sam when he knew Sam couldn't handle it.

Sam was shaking his head slowly and refusing to look up. "You're just giving up."

"You have to listen to me," Dean said in a softer tone. "Just put all the rest aside and think. Sooner or later I think I'm just gonna...separate, permanently. It feels like that. As in, drop dead somewhere, and leave you with that to deal with. In the meantime, I'm drawing everything right to us. You saw that. Sooner or later you'll get hurt. Sooner or later we'll both be dead. Help Dad, and go on, and kill the thing that killed Mom and Jess. Don't make this all for nothing."

Sam kept shaking his head. "I'll find a better way to stitch you up. We'll find someone who knows more about this."

Dean waited a moment. Then he said, "Don't make me go on like this, Sam."

It was that his voice was so calm and matter-of-fact; that was what finally broke Sam.

Sam put his face in his hands.

Dean knew he was crying and knew he couldn't join him if they were going to get through this. "You don't have to do it. But if you're not going to, then you have to let me go."

"No," Sam said, dropping his hands, already shaking with denial. "No. After all this, there's no way this is where we end up."

"It's like I always tell the girls," Dean said with the faintest smirk, a moment of everything back the way it was. "There's only so much of me to go around." The smirk faded because he couldn't even hold on to that, really. He blinked at Sam for a moment and it was obvious it was taking a lot of his concentration to focus on where he was. "It's okay, Sam. We did good."

Sam slid to his knees on the floor between the beds, head bowed. He meant to say _don't leave me_ but the words wouldn't come, maybe because he knew they were unfair or because it was too much to ask. He wiped at his face, thoughts still darting between possibilities. Stitching Dean back up meant risking this again, and he was right, he couldn't keep doing it, but sealing him in meant only hoping he could get him back out once he found a better way to weave him back together -

"Sammy," Dean said. "You did good."

Sam lashed out and gripped the denim at one of Dean's shins, using it as a representation of what he meant to do in all ways, and the circuit still didn't close and there was less underneath to hold onto already. He leaned closer and rested his forehead on one of Dean's knees, listening to him fade. The tide slowed against the contact, whatever it was, but didn't stop, no reason for the physical part to stay bound to whatever it was that made his brother all the things he'd become over time.

"It's not that bad," Dean said.

Screw fair. Nothing was too much to ask. "Don't leave me," Sam said, and he didn't mean to break down but words like that demanded more than just being spoken, they had to mean everything. "Don't. Help me figure this out."

Dean carded his fingers through Sam's hair, possibly more _Dean_ then than he'd ever been, the world no longer pressing down. "I never would," he said. "Right? I'm always..." He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was far away. "Yeah. Let go of me, Sam. You're all there is."

Sam knew he meant _holding me here_ and he didn't have the strength to pry his hands loose or lift his head, he'd never have the strength, the idea kept flinching away even though it was right in front of him.

_No._

_No, no, no._

Dean sighed, and it seemed like something was slipping when the door unlocked itself behind Sam in quick snaps.

-I-


	7. Chapter 6

a/n: so much great feedback - you guys are too good to me. Thanks to anyone who's read, reviewed, read and reviewed, or ...well, you know, anything.

**Woven - 6**  
(c)2006 b stearns

* * *

-I-

The slipping became a gathering and Sam began to realize what was happening at the door.

The Unlocker Of Doors had found them again. Like things weren't bad enough already, like Dean wasn't already spilling out of his hands.

Luckily grief is easily mutable into so many other things.

He had no idea whether physically opening the door would make any difference; he didn't stop to think about what it was or what it could do. He would just barrel through until he found a way to stop it. It didn't matter what that was. He had something to focus his desperation on and that was better than doing nothing. He couldn't figure out how to deal with the bigger threat of Dean pouring himself out into the world, but he could act on this one thing, this thing directly making it worse. Grabbing Dean two nights earlier and the _shock_ it caused him had been his last warning that he could never fold Dean together again, that a line had been crisscrossed to the point of obliteration. He had managed to channel Dean's accidentally pent up energy, whatever had been bleeding from the cracks he'd left behind by folding Dean back together without knowing what he was doing. He should have understood right then that he'd only masked a greater problem. Their escape had been only a result of the thing's confusion.

Sam remembered how overshadowed he'd been, all locked up in his own properly constructed shell, whole but maybe the oddest shaped puzzle piece in the great life-web he'd had a glimpse of while trying to shield Dean from the Unlocker, part of an interconnected _everything_ made of the walking sparks of the lives lived for miles around. He wasn't sure if what he'd seen was just hallucination and it didn't matter then because one thing had become glaringly true: Dean no longer fit in the scheme. There was no longer a shape to him; the puzzle couldn't hold him. Sam hadn't been able to let go any more than any electrocution victim could release the live wires that locked muscles in place while the tiny electrical impulses that held them together were overloaded and destroyed.

Sam had wanted to believe that he wasn't responsible for changing Dean's shape until he no longer fit the scheme. Or for changing his shape until it was easy for the vulture at the door to siphon him off.

When he turned the knob, Sam felt the pulling that Dean must have, but it was nothing that could harm him, just a testing of his defenses somehow, a jackal waiting for an opening while weeding the herd, voracious but harmless if you were put together correctly.

It was worse to find out that it was nothing more than a barely sentient thing of hunger picking up a trail. There was nothing malevolent in the attack now that he was this close to it; it passed Sam off as he opened the door because Sam was not ideal prey even if he _felt_ like his soul was bleeding.

There was nothing solid to attack or curse; the doorway was empty in too many ways. What was there was not there for him, and as a result he couldn't get a grip on it any more than it could plant hooks in him.

He was familiar with what it held, though.

He reached out the same way he'd reached for Dean moments earlier, but without hands. Something more ephemeral than the cloth he'd held but no less woven together slipped through his fingers while he tried to find the right combination between himself and what he sought that would make them compatible. It was blind instinct and hope and not much else, since he had no idea what the hell he was doing on a conscious level. It wasn't as if he'd make it worse by trying.

He was never sure what he saw after that. He remembered an afternoon one summer just after his fourteenth birthday, when his height finally equaled Dean's, but his muscle mass hadn't caught up and Dean had said _quit wearing my shirts_ and an attempt to wrestle one in question away from him had become a tug of war of epic proportions. It had ended up outside in the parking lot of the motor lodge they were staying in. The moment of surprise on Dean's face once he realized that nothing would be easy with Sam from then on had begun a contest that, horrifyingly enough, attracted bystanders after it went on for more than twenty minutes. How the shirt had managed to hold up as long as it did was a mystery. They'd both been so stubborn, too stubborn to give up even when they gave ground. Dean had looked _grateful_ for an instant, puzzling Sam for a long time afterward.

Sam got it, finally. Dean had been waiting for him.

It felt like tug of war then, over cloth that was no less than the journeywork of twenty seven years, fibers shaped by the heart and hands and decisions of his brother. He could do no less than wrap his hands in it and fight as if it were his own.

It was.

He pulled with everything he was, even though to any onlooker he was just some tall, weary-looking young man with tear tracks on his face, standing in an open doorway with his hand on the inside knob, eyes closed, face a study of concentration. He stood as conduit between Dean and the Unlocker for a moment without the same debilitating draining of his own life that had occurred with direct contact. He held on and on, flashpoint memories and impressions passing him or hitting him between the shoulderblades, all choosing him over what stood in the doorway and finding a home with him. He didn't hear the glass in the single window facing the parking lot crack; he didn't hear the mirror of the vanity just outside the bathroom door crack inward from the corners and fall out of its frame. He didn't hear the lightbulbs of both table lamps and the overhead switch-light burst and scatter glass everywhere and didn't see the light leave the room. The same odd pattern began behind his eyes again, of overlapping threads spreading away from him or toward him, the same thing he'd seen two nights earlier. Dean was not just a single thread in the web but several, woven through and around him, severed and trailing loose away into the dark. He was only able to grab the edge of one, the final one, the last of everything.

When he could make sense of sight and sound again, he was aware of sitting cross-legged on a hard surface that was still warm from a day of sun even though it had been dark for awhile. When he opened his eyes, his head was turned to the left, the neon of a strip mall half a mile down the road making him blink. It was silent, too silent for a rent-by-the-night place so close to a major road. He was in the parking lot, sitting in the middle of the damn parking lot, waiting to get run over.

He turned his head and found Dean sitting across from him, mirroring his pose, knees almost touching his. Sam wasn't surprised, somehow. Dean looked obliquely amused.

"Dean," Sam said.

"Stay inside, Sam," Dean said in a distantly kind tone.

Sam twisted back to look at the door to their room. It was open, with a single light on inside that didn't look normal, some sort of faint blue-amber flicker painting the walls.

When he turned back, Dean was gone.

"Hey!"

Sam startled, eyes open to a blinding white light.

"Get outta the way, dumbass!"

Not sitting. Standing, in the middle of the parking lot, in the beams of headlights.

He stumbled back and the car passed him as he looked around for Dean. Parked cars and safety lights and the open door to their room, the memory of something wrapped in his hands. He hadn't let go. Whatever it was hadn't been separate from what he was already put together with, so he didn't feel it well at first, but it was there.

Running back to the room didn't seem possible; he felt like he'd been sleeping for days. Nothing tried to stop him or look him over; he'd chased the vulture off.

How much different had the revenant been, really? The hunger had channeled itself into desperation in that case instead of a need for...sustenance.

_I wish I had locked him in._

_I could have kept him together until I found a way to fix it. I could have found a way to get him out. _

He wasn't sure where the fatalism was coming from; he'd stopped what was at the door. He'd patch Dean together any way he could, no matter _what_ he said, and then they'd find a way. They always found a way. He would find the edges and hold them together even if it meant nonstop contact -

_(you just wanna hold hands)_

Sam paused at the spot where the asphalt met the yellowed, aged cement of the walkway, feet from the door. One more line of demarcation. Always one more. He had heard Dean as clearly as he had just sitting in the 'lot. Only, he had never been sitting in the 'lot and if someone had told him he was actually smearing the air as he walked because he was spread too thin, he'd have believed them.

The room felt empty.

"Dean," he said aloud to the dark. He could only see a few feet in because of the outside safety lights. Dean would answer him and then he wouldn't have to step forward and _find_ anything. Dean would be sitting on the bed and holding it together and calling him a girl. Because Dean, his Dean, would never have said _let me go. _Not on his worst day, not even while trying to hold his own guts in after being eviscerated. He would say _just get me some gauze _and _we have shit to do _and _quit lookin' at me._

He stepped up to the door and his knees tried to buckle because he'd always liked trying but he'd never actually been good at bullshitting himself. Dean was sprawled backward on the bed, not like he'd meant to but looking the way people did once they'd simply slumped into whatever configuration gravity bestowed on them when there was nothing else to counteract it. His feet were still on the floor and the room had felt empty to Sam because it was. He could just make out rapidly drying green eyes, one bloodshot to opacity, open to the ceiling. Windows shuttered for the night.

Sam didn't realize he was gesturing with his hands in midair or that he kept making several false starts toward the bed because he was panicking. The definition of insanity was the act of repeating the same task over and over and hoping for a different result, and Sam spent several moments liberated from anything resembling rational thought while his eyes darted away and back like he could see something tolerable if he just kept trying.

"Okay," he said finally, not anywhere near acceptance, just a kind of acknowledgment that he was still upright and that whatever had happened in the 'lot was not happening in front of him now. He wasn't peeling back a world-layer and checking for things he was missing. He wasn't capable of that. He wasn't.

He didn't realize his face and hands were numb from hyperventilating until he tried to touch Dean's face and couldn't feel it. The backs of his fingers against a finally-untroubled brow registered warmth after a moment and there was breath against his wrist. Dean was still alive, maybe just unable to stay conscious now that so much was missing. That was all.

Sam sat cross-legged on the bed and leaned over Dean at chest height with one arm braced over him, waiting for the shell to do more than breathe.

He was perfectly calm when he gently closed Dean's eyes and calmer still when he pressed his lips to Dean's forehead. The shell was empty.

He wasn't sure how long he sat, dry eyed, one hand against the side of Dean's face while he waited for some last twinge of hope that didn't come. It was already done. Nothing left to run after or struggle for. Just a breathing corpse that seemed familiar on the surface. Nothing left but a little mercy.

He thought about the last step with a detached precision that visited the emotionally bereft once they reached a stunned understanding of what was best or right.

_Don't let me run loose in the dark, Sam._

Dean was already running loose, and no one survived that intact. All he had to do was reach for one of the pillows and press gently and Dean would be free of that world altogether and no longer beholden to anything. Sam could be brave this one last time and do something more than lower his forehead to Dean's chest and sob like a child or repeat that he _couldn't._

Couldn't do _this,_ couldn't go _on,_ it was all the same thing.

When he tried to raise his head again it seemed as if it was heavier than it should have been, more than he could blame on the pain and enough to shake him into paying attention. Something drew away from him and toward Dean, catching them together like a nail that had a ragged notch and was catching at everything with a weave. He thought again of the way the Unlocker had unraveled Dean and realized that edges didn't necessarily mean smooth surfaces. The thing at the door had accidentally taught him something.

The wretched surprise of hope made him lean away a little and breathe. Something answered when he laid his hands on Dean's chest, on his _shell_.

Dean had left it entirely but wasn't gone. Whatever Sam had slapped out of the jaws of the thing at the door was all that was left, coiled up one arm unseen the way an extension cord was rewound, elbow to thumb over and over, stored for better days. Sam was not alone but he sure as hell felt it anyway.

Stitches would not do this time. It had nothing to do with stitches or patching and it never had. He'd have to be as bad as the thing at the door to even have a chance of keeping Dean alive.

He'd live with that.

He needed to keep the shell safe while he found a way to wind the better days between his hands again.

-I-


	8. Chapter 7

**Woven, 7**  
(c)b stearns  
a/n: References to _Wendigo_. The bit of poem is _Epistle To Be Left In The Earth _by Archibald MacLeish.

* * *

-I-

Sam would later label several things _pathetic_ by his own estimation, when it came to that whole month.

That first week, after the revenant had decided it was going to hitchhike for awhile? Things would have been different if he'd been able to find it during the daylight hours, but no, he'd blown that completely. He'd allowed it to chase and harass him until that gun he'd laid out on the bed every night began to seem like the only way out. Then chasing Dean all the way to the goddamn overpass before finding the courage or desperation to grab him and let anything happen that would leave Dean alive.

Kind of messy, that whole thing.

He couldn't quite decide if any of that was as sad as finding himself back out in the parking lot in the middle of the night wondering if talking to Dean earlier had been nothing more than a hallucination. That was bad enough, but he was also out there with this eyes closed and his hands held out while he tried to convince himself he'd be able to feel if there were any residuals nearby he could grab hold of. He'd caught hold of one whole (last, he tried not to remind himself) thread and held on; he knew what he was looking for. There was no sense of volume or mass, just that there was more and that what he had wasn't enough to put back together. He'd backtrack everywhere they'd been, all the way back to that damn overpass in Indiana if he had to, if Dean had left himself that far and wide. He'd do that and make it work.

Of everything, what scared him the most was leaving Dean alone. It didn't seem wise to drag him around, because he wasn't sure how tenuous that last bit of life was, whatever it was that kept his brain stem active enough to allow breath and heartbeat. That could stop at any time, or never, and Sam could not leave him there unguarded in any case. Maybe he wasn't bleeding away into the world anymore, but they had left a trail and Sam imagined any number of things picking up on the fact that Dean was helpless.

And then there was always _the living_. More than once someone had tried their motel door in the night to see if it was locked, in any number of cities and small towns. Once, they'd both gone right after someone for it, slipping out in silence to watch two guys in their late teens test doors and prowl cars in the parking lot. There had been a giddy maliciousness to the stalking and then the obviously overdue thrashing they gave the pair, stripping them of everything they had, including their clothes, without ever saying a word. It was Dean's low, almost evil laughter that had scared them the most, Sam knew, as the guys ran off; Dean up to no good was fun to see but terrifying to hear.

Yeah, the _living_ were harder to deal with and salt would not keep them out. He needed someone to guard Dean and keep him breathing. Someone he could trust, who could get there fast.

But who was there to help?

They didn't know anybody nearby. He thought of Hailey and Ben. They'd believe him, they'd remember him, and they'd be likely to help. But Lost Creek was...too far. If he thought about it, if he pictured the atlas they'd been using, it was over 200 miles away. Assuming they dropped everything they were doing, assuming they got there at a breakneck pace, assuming they could make it at all, he couldn't wait that long.

He had a terrible feeling that soulstuff didn't _keep_. He couldn't be sure. Maybe it left a trail of suggestions and maybe it didn't, maybe it kept a form for awhile, maybe it expired once left exposed too long. He had an even more terrible feeling that the only reason he'd been able to argue with the Unlocker of Doors was because he was already wearing Dean around in some way. If that was possible, then his best chance of proving it would be back at that house.

The safest thing to do would be to drop Dean off at the nearest hospital and then try and explain why he wanted him kept alive at all costs when there was no brain activity. And of course they'd understand later when he wanted to draw symbols of protection around the bed or something if a ritual was necessary to put Dean back together.

Right.

_I'm just performing an exorcism in reverse, nothing to see here, move along._

Their father was not going to answer. He never had before, and Sam was not about to leave the kind of message he felt like leaving. _I need someone to watch Dean's body while I look for his soul._ And that would have been if he'd felt somewhat calm or stable. He was more likely to leave something incoherent into the void, a string of nothing going nowhere, heard but never _heard,_ solving nothing and wasting what little time he felt he had.

Standing outside in the dark with his face tilted to the sky and hands held out as if he was waiting for rain or his mothership or who knew what, maybe that was wasting time too but it was all he could seem to do, at the moment.

Miracles had not been very kind to him in life that far - they made their own luck, really, so he had tried not to ask for anything in return when they tipped things a little closer to the side of good again, whatever the hell that was. He'd been sacrificing for that all his life. Not knowing his mom, not having anything even approaching a sane childhood, not getting to keep who he'd felt was the love of his life. He could at least keep his _brother_, his one and only constant; that wasn't too much to ask. He deserved that and had earned it, after everything else, the chance to keep the person who loved him most in the world, his only meaningful human contact, the first _love of his life_.

He dropped his hands because he wasn't getting anywhere, didn't feel anything. He ran his hands through his hair instead, trying to settle himself. He could leave Dean there and just hope against hope that he was right, that he could find enough to work with and Dean would still be breathing when he got back. He would salt the door and pray that nothing came along, that they hadn't been followed by anything else that would just love to find Dean's empty shell and wander around in it.

No. He couldn't ever go through that again.

"You could at least let me _keep my brother_," he said aloud, not talking to anyone or any deity in particular, not even hearing it just like he didn't hear someone say his name.

When a hand landed on his arm, he swung with his free arm in a wild arc without thinking. The other person ducked away and caught that free arm, spinning him and catching him off balance, shoving him face first onto the hood of the nearest car just hard enough to knock the breath out of him and little more.

Before he could roll away and lash out, a voice said, "'Do not stand in the dark at the open windows.'"

Sam froze. Even under the adrenaline and confusion, a ping of memory fired. They used code like they breathed, over phone lines and across tables and scrawled in chalk or marker across nitches in rest stop benches. Sometimes runes, or initials masquerading as vandals with crushes, or lines of poetry. It kept misunderstandings at bay, it was breadcrumbs for the path, it made friends and contacts easy to pick out even when their faces weren't familiar. Sam hadn't heard this particular phrase for years, since long before he'd left for school, one more obscure line that just sounded like some kind of warning. He remembered the answer, though.

"'Also none among us has seen God,'" he said breathlessly.

"Okay. Better."

The weight was gone off Sam's back and he rolled away, taking the hand that was offered to help him straighten. The figure was backlit, Dean's height and build but their dad's age, dark hair cut almost too close to the scalp, hard to see. He was wearing a denim jacket that looked as if it had survived more than one bout of road rash.

"Hey, kid," the voice said. "You're a _hell _of a lot taller than the last time I saw you. Been about fifteen years, maybe. Tom Atcheson."

Sam sighed and stopped wracking his brain. A contact of their dad's. He had a dim memory of a week in the Catskills that included a lot of survival training in the wilderness that had become a game. He remembered a grin and a wink as the man before him told his father _boy's a natural in the woods_ and Sam had been careful not to admit that the trees had helped him.

"How did you - "

"You boys aren't hard to track, to the right eyes," Tom said. "I got a tip that you might need some help. Your dad's a little worried."

Sam could do nothing but stare for a moment. He glanced back toward the still-open door of their room.

"A man knows when his boys need help," Tom said. "And I was in the area. He's okay, Sam. Question is, are you?"

Sam wanted to revise his internal understanding of miracles when he had time. He also wanted to try and wrap his head around the idea that something big enough had happened to get his dad's attention through their network or possibly more unconventional means. He could be paranoid later and question the very idea that he'd been out there calling for help and help had come, because shit like that did not happen. "I don't have time to explain everything," he said, realizing somewhere in the back of his mind that he was probably looking and sounding as frantic as he felt. "I need you to watch Dean and make sure he doesn't..." He paused just short of saying _make sure he doesn't die_. "Make sure he keeps breathing."

Okay, so, he wasn't making that sound worse than it was, even though it did come out as something pretty dramatic. He'd earned a little drama.

While Tom followed him back to the room Sam realized he was babbling about revenants and edges and stitches and lightning, all out of order and out of line. He only stopped when Tom used his flashlight to check Dean's eyes and reflexes (pupils dilated and fixed, and a big no on any reflexes) and said _Oh, Sam, he's gone._ Or that's what Sam thought he heard.

"No," Sam said quickly. "Just out, for awhile, and I have enough to get started but not enough to keep going. You have to believe me. After all the other stuff that's out there, after the stuff we've seen and done, this can't be _impossible. _I can get him back, I just need you to give me time. _Don't let him go."_

Tom stared at him expressionlessly, and for just a moment, lit only haphazardly from the parking lot, Sam could have sworn he wavered and became less opaque. Then Tom said, "Need lightbulbs first. Stay put while I bug the desk clerk."

Practicality was a good sign.

Sam sat on the bed next to Dean with one hand on his brother's chest and thought about how long he could get away with carrying him around, these unseen parts of him, until something gave. It wasn't that there wouldn't be enough room. It was that he was already attached to what he had, and how much of himself would he lose in the eventual mix?

What scared him was that he wasn't sure he minded all that much. That, and he was losing it.

He never heard Tom come back. His first warning was the lamp on the nightstand switching back on and half blinding him.

"How'd you manage to blow all the lights?" Tom said.

"Must've been a power surge," Sam said, then tried not to laugh because it would become a sob. Yeah. Losing it.

"Someone's gonna break out and tell me the whole story on this one eventually, right?" Tom said.

Sam barely registered the fact that he couldn't quite focus on the other man. It just wasn't important. He wouldn't have cared if someone in a sparkly dress had dropped out of the sky mumbling about pumpkins and told him to get back by midnight, so long as it got things done. "When this is all over, I will," Sam said. "I can put him back together, I know I can."

He stood and repeated what he'd done earlier, making motions toward the door and back toward the bed, chest aching while he tried to decide if he should say _goodbye_ or _I'll be right back_, because he wasn't sure if any of it would work and it had just finally occurred to him that Dean might not want to come back. He hadn't even asked, he hadn't bothered to consider that maybe Dean was done with all this, as impossible as that seemed to Sam. Dean wouldn't just give up, but it had been Sam who'd said _stuff might not look or feel the same after you're dead._

"He's not dead," Sam said aloud.

"Sam," Tom said.

"Just don't let him go until I'm sure," Sam said, suddenly calm. He crossed back to the bed and hooked an arm under Dean's knees, swinging his legs onto the bed and rolling him gently onto one side so that his back was to the door. He would look like he was sleeping that way; he could leave Dean looking like he was sleeping.

The man standing to one side looking at him with a guarded pity had once told John Winchester that even half out of his wits with panic, the younger of the two Winchester boys was beyond dangerous in ways that had nothing to do with violence.

"Don't let anything get him," Sam said.

-I-

At first he couldn't find it again. He had a moment of believing the house had never been there, none of it had actually happened and he'd been having another hallucination.

_Just get a grip, Sam,_ he thought. _This is one of those things you just do, this has to be a job._

When he did find it again, and parked in the same place down the block, his relief was intensified by the fact that there was no one there milling around or investigating anything. Everyone was too busy covering up their own windows to care that an abandoned house had been ground zero for the whole thing in the first place. Someone would write it all off as a sonic boom from a low flying jet or a mysterious gas leak they'd never find. All he cared about was the quiet and solitude and that no one would be bothering him while he...searched.

When he could be sure he was right about being alone, he left the car and kept to the shadowed part of the street, thinking even in the middle of his desperation to get close to the house that he was forgetting something. He didn't know or care what that was until he tried to step onto the lawn from the street and had to stop.

He paused there and waited, then stepped forward again. That time, it got all his attention.

_It doesn't want me._

Dean had said that, about the house.

"What the hell wouldn't _want_ you?" Sam said aloud. He turned his head to the right and caught a glimpse of the dark figure at the edge of his vision that vanished when he tried to look at it head-on. Something guarding the property. Dean, leaning up against the car only an hour earlier, staring off into the dark, saying _elemental_ and _if you let go of me I think it'll quit _about separate things. Sam was having trouble with the idea of separate things since Dean had gone supernova.

Dean had meant to burn the house. And it hadn't let him in.

Sam could see streetlight-glint off the jagged edges of the glass left in the empty windowframes from there, right where he'd come to rest earlier. Something along the edges of his vision was kaleidoscoping in grays and greens while he stood with one foot on the lawn and one under the world, knee deep in the other side of forever with a day pass because he was almost two for the price of one. He struggled not to look. Whatever had come before was none of his business and nothing he wanted to see.

He thought about the saltline he'd kept Once out with, and decided not to agree with the power the thing near the property line had been assigned. It was sunny and they were standing in some parking lot again and Dean was saying _we didn't set the rules _and _maybe none of this stuff has any real power._ Dew-soaked darkness in his present and a hint of summer around it and something sparking near the house, something amber-blue and waiting. He was afraid that if he looked at the house too closely he'd see the shape of his own outline would be burned into the side of it, the only unscathed place after a flashpoint of something too bright to bear.

_I won't burn the house. I promise._

There was a little girl with a ball under one arm standing in the yard near the rear corner, an outline with faltering patterns that frayed at the edges, not holding for much longer or maybe not holding at all. Butterflies painted on the walls for as long as the walls stood. Someone moved inside past the empty window, and before he could shut it out there was a brief moment where he was standing in a crowd of half-lit figures. He closed his eyes for a moment and a radiating pattern of amber-blue spread out along the yard, Dean's last stand shown as the center point of a spider web. He was too grateful to be snared to keep being frightened.

_I promise, I won't touch the house, I won't bother the land._

It didn't matter how long the thing had been there or who had set it; the builder, the original owner two houses ago, maybe someone who'd camped there when it was hillside and undeveloped. He never would have seen or felt it if he was himself, and Dean would never have been troubled by it if he'd been seamless. All that really mattered was that when he stepped forward again, he could walk across the grass toward the house and get home, walk right into the center point of what Dean had left behind. He could lay on the grass in the middle of it and gather it like a blanket, just wrap himself in it so easily.

And stay.

-I-


	9. Chapter 8

**Woven 8**  
(c)b stearns 

a/n: Edison really was trying to build a machine to communicate with the dead and measure _life units _when he died. References to _Skin_ and _And Fools Shine On_, plus more obscure weird-ass poetry added as a bonus! Extreme thanks for the reviews and forputting up with my nonsense.

* * *

-I- 

At first the light seemed fine on his eyelids, perfectly normal since he'd been knocked on his ass by it earlier. Of course there was light, just not visible. _And God said, let there be light, and there was, and it kicked his ass._

It was also perfectly normal to smirk to himself over something that dumb. But he was wet and cold and if they were camping again, he didn't remember anything that led up to it.

Sam opened his eyes to early morning sunlight filtered through a row of evergreen bushes. They were so straight that it was obvious they were bordering something, and the grass he was lying on hadn't been mowed in weeks but it was still someone's yard anyway. There was a very large brown tabby staring at him from the edge of the lawn, unblinking yellow-green eyes finding him an _idiot._

When everything came back, Sam startled so hard that he scared the cat into sliding away in a long, low blur. He sat up and felt the stiffness of a night on the ground, but below that was a hell of a lot of something else catching him close and forcing him to work to gather it. The washed out, lemon-cyan sky meant only early morning, but morning nonetheless and hours spent away from where he'd meant to be. There was a night behind him of promising not to burn the house, and trying to capture gossamer edges that felt and tasted of his brother out of the places where they'd sunk right into the earth. Winding them along his fingers and wrapping them across arms and chest, calling to something not quite sentient anymore because the components had drifted. He only imagined these things; there were no pieces he could sift through and he hadn't really been able to quantify whatever it was he'd done. His brain understood patterns and the idea of assigning physicality to something that he had no understanding of except that he could recognize its existence. If he could assign the idea of touch to whatever he held, then the weightless second skin of it was something he'd held before, edges folded together so temporarily just the week before. This was familiar in the right combination. Not his, but something that might blend in a little at a time if he asked, something that might match his steps and lend its light to his own.

He was running across the grass then, intent on getting to the car and getting the hell out of there without looking back, because the longer he waited the more sense it made to keep waiting. He didn't check to see if the elemental was still visible to him; he didn't care. There would be no flinching or pausing because the afterimages of what had been or could be were crowding his tweaked sensitivity. He wasn't going to let any of it happen this time. He'd get back to Dean and put them both back together and then they'd be gone. They'd be gone and stay gone until Sam was sure nothing like any of it happened again. He was only a couple of miles away and he could hold it together at least that long.

He tried not to let the suggestion of what had gone on in his sleep spill over into his conscious mind. There were dreams or maybe just memories in that, a sense of things that didn't belong to him. None of it mattered because he had everything draped over his shoulders and refusing to stay tamped down. He would just drive, and not think, and if he could just get back to Dean then it would work itself out somehow or he would just fit square pegs into round holes until the world changed and that became the way to do things.

He didn't actually remember the drive the way he didn't remember what had happened after he laid down in the grass near the house. What stood out to him was that the door to their room was _open_.

Sam's mind flipped back and forth with alarming speed between how it didn't mean anything and how he was going to survive finding Dean dead or missing. He tucked the .38 that was usually under the passenger seat into the small of his back as he got out of the car. Tom was going to look at him like he'd lost his mind, good, that was fine, and in the meantime his knees were locking and sweat was pouring off him while he tried to get across the parking lot without falling. Not quite himself anymore and not quite anyone else, just needing something to happen that would help him find a direction to take or maybe just force his hand.

He pushed the door the rest of the way open without pausing outside, stepping in and staring at Dean, lying just the way he'd left him. Nothing else had been changed or touched, and when he tried to flip the lights on from the doorway nothing happened.

It wasn't that big of a leap to think that the bulbs had never been changed and the light had come from somewhere else; maybe the door had been left open just to let him know things were okay and there was nothing to fear. Dean was warm and breathing and when he checked his eyes, neither was bloodshot, like whatever had happened had never hurt him, like he hadn't really shattered.

Sam tossed the gun on the other bed and didn't really care that the door was still open. He rolled Dean onto his back and listened, finding himself just sitting on the edge of the bed and waiting for something to be right and real. Dean was not a jar of sand he could just redistribute and pour into a mold.

Thomas Edison had believed that each living thing was composed of a certain number of life units that when assembled the right way became certain predisposed forms - a tree, an elephant, a sibling. Sam had always liked the idea that when you were done with your assigned units, they wandered off to become other things. He didn't like it as much now that there was a possibility that he didn't have all of Dean and someone else of his own accidental making would open green eyes on him and break his heart. No one knew where the line between what was gathered over time with muscle memory or with the ridges etched into white matter was drawn with the incorporeal idea of self. Your memories were what you were made of but they had to be taken in and stored, so it all started with a physical connection with the world. Somewhere between Plato and Descartes and Hume and Kant was this impossible tangle of reality and all the crap he learned in that 200 level philosophy course he'd taken for humanities credit was pointless now.

He could think this through. He could think anything through.

Atoms were physical and could be split but there was so much room between them and inside them, and maybe they dealt with shades and spirits and the effects of a million causes every day but never did they deal with wholesale _souls_, not even their _own_. Not whole, malleable matter-that-wasn't, just the castoffs caught in one frame of sorrow or rage or searching.

_What the fuck is wrong with you, Sam? Who the hell else is going to put me back?_

He lifted his head again because he realized he'd said it aloud. Dean's words and inflections but in his own tones, something he'd done on purpose many times to annoy his brother.

"I don't know what I'm doing," he said aloud. They kept coming back to this same place - better to leave him the way he was or risk another color of disaster by crossing his fingers and heart and believing doing the best he could was the right thing. There would be no happy ending to the life they were living, not even the most fantastic luck of the draw would leave them all alive and whole. There was already more damage done than a lifetime of peace could assuage; Sam felt doomed and worse, felt the impermanence of what remained of his family. Things would never be _okay_. They would not survive the destruction of the evil that had shoved them onto their current path and didn't expect to; if they did, Dean would just find other evil to annoy until the law of averages dropped the other shoe on him.

Sam had the chance to lose him in some quiet way that didn't mean terror and pain.

He had no right to save him. He had no right to _not _save him.

How much more damage could he really do, no matter what he did?

That was kind of hilarious, and now that he wasn't quite sure how much of the last eight hours or so was real, it was perfectly normal to find himself in the parking lot again thinking about maybe just keeping things to himself because weren't they both better off? He'd never be Dean but Dean would kind of go on, and he was already _dead _anyway after the thing in St. Louis. Dean wasn't safe.

Sam wouldn't even have to miss him. He already fit like the one flannel he liked best, soft-worn cotton with just the right weight to it, stretched a little over time so that it was just his and would never fit anyone else. If he thought about it, really thought about it, Dean wouldn't mind all that much. This way Sam would never leave him, no one would ever leave him again. Maybe he'd never know it in any conscious way but he would know in all the ways that mattered. He wouldn't really be Dean, but he'd feel it somewhere. Sam would never get a call in the middle of the night saying _Dean wanted me to tell you _or _it was quick _or any number of variations to tell him the other shoe had come along.

The skinwalker had only wanted Dean's face and memories and the revenant had wanted to kick him out altogether and they were fucking _saints _in Sam's mind compared to what he realized he wanted.

He shook himself out of it. He was standing on the side of the road by then looking across four lanes and realizing that abandoned houses _wanted_ to burn after they'd had enough. Dean would only stand empty for so long before there was no other choice and burning was the last bit of mercy Sam could show him.

Traffic passed him warily as if the drivers thought he meant to cross. Part of the same poem-password Tom had used came back to him.

_Each man believes in his heart he will die  
Many have left last thoughts and last letters_

And it just wasn't okay to think about the one Stephen King book where the guy tried to get his kid back and ended up with a murderous little zombie he'd ended up killing again. King got a lot of things right but he also missed as many times as he hit and Sam had written several drunken, anonymous emails and letters to the guy that he had luckily destroyed before sending each time. He was just psyching himself out into doing nothing because he was damned if he did or didn't or got halfway or stood around hoping.

It took him that long to realize that thinking was the last thing this required.

_Adjuration is rather an earnest appeal, or a most stringent command requiring another to act, or not to act, under pain of divine visitation or the rupture of the sacred ties of reverence and love._

He would ask Dean. And whatever was conveyed, he'd honor it no matter what it meant he had to do or not do.

He locked the door to the room that time and put a chair under the knob He left a ring of salt around the bed Dean was on and propped one of the shotguns against the wall by the headboard. Handguns on the night stand and his blades at the foot of the bed, razor-sharp crescents of last resort. If he was very unlucky then one of the weapons would keep Dean from wading back out into the world as some kind of shambling horror. He wasn't going to tie him down and leave himself one last chance to hesitate.

If he could wind it, then he could also _unwind_ it. He would see whether the patterns recognized themselves.

He stood over Dean for several long minutes, looking for some internal switch or loose thought to work from, a beginning or an end, the process in reverse. He was nothing more than a collection of atoms and Dean was only the space between. He stood there and wondered how he could be wrapped in everything Dean was and not really have it overwhelm him, not download his memories or get a better sense of him than he had just listening to his spoken and unguarded thoughts.

_Hey, Dean, what the hell are you made of that your soul can come apart?_

Maybe that was all anyone could do after giving so much of themselves to someone else.

It had seemed effortless to Sam to string himself out enough to keep all the edges together, edges he remembered as already being frayed and none of that done _recently._

Dean's frayed edges were part of who he _was_, and to change any of it would be the same caliber of evil that Sam had always promised himself he'd never indulge in even if it meant losing everything otherwise. All well and good to imagine and make vows until faced with the ugly reality. He would not reseal any of the edges, he would not try and smooth certain things over, he would not reorder the bad or the good.

If not for the thing in St. Louis, it would simply be a matter of erasing Dean's memories of hunting, of father and brother, of mother-on-the-ceiling and just drop him somewhere to start over. Redemption through desecration and then a _tabula rasa _to walk away with and the chance to find some way to be happy. Dean would do that, Dean was built that way...to be happy.

But Dean's damage made him _Dean_.

Cruel to leave him alive and crueler to rob him of the only life he knew how to live.

Sam laid down on the bed on his back next to Dean and stared at the ceiling. After a moment he said, "If it'd been the other way around and I was coming to the door every night, I think you'd have gone outside sooner. If it'd been you out here and me in there." He slipped his left hand into Dean's lax but warm right, lacing their fingers together. Something spiraled away, just a suggestion of something beyond the contact itself. "You would have let it jump to you just so you could flip it shit, right?" He crossed his ankles and wished whatever he was doing then was as easy as a transfer of will. "Don't pay any attention. It's just that I wanna hold hands, right?"

If he closed his eyes and quit looking outside instead of in, then it was easier to wind the bad days with the good and the intolerable with the necessary.

He was pretty sure he said he was sorry out loud but it didn't really matter.

He'd gone wrong before by just trying to repair the damage. You didn't just try and hold something like this together, it had to be rewoven so there was nothing to unravel. That had never occurred to him even though he'd been immersed in the edges long enough to know where each was.

He didn't so much try and do anything or force or even ask as much as he just simply offered and waited. Some things put themselves together when hands were offered and the right questions were asked. He could fold one idea there and a memory over it, no particular pattern when the whole was something that ordered itself. Matter could not be created or destroyed, only changed or redistributed, and it helped that Dean had always been a force unto himself.

He remembered Dean saying _Sam, you've gotta let go of me _and his answer had been the only one he knew how to give: _I can't._ It had probably sounded like he was trapped or that whatever was running between them had looped him in but really all he could do was eclipse the one last brightness he still had so that the darker things couldn't see it.

Some of his own better days might have gone into the folding and weaving. He wasn't quite sure. It felt like it was supposed to go that way. If he had missed gathering all the parts then he could just fill in the spaces with his own.

_The negative and positive charges are always trying to get to each other, they have to._

Lightning was a connection of sky and earth, order asking chaos to check in. He was going to wait and wait until his opposite number reached out to _shake hands._

-I-


	10. Chapter 9

**Woven 9**  
(c)b stearns  
warnings: angst.  
a/n: a few lines borrowed from irishdf. - thanks. Gratuitous _Lost_ reference thrown in just because; possible spoiler. 

For those of us who did the best we could but didn't get our miracles.

* * *

I am going to a place  
Where the porch light's on in case  
You forgot to stay awake for me.  
–Tremolo, _Wait Up For Me_

-I-

Sam knew he'd never been asleep - he could tell. But he couldn't figure out how much time had passed or how the hell he'd managed to end up on the floor in front of the open door. None of the weapons had been touched; they were still positioned right where he'd left them. The talcum powder Dean had left on the floor and a few surfaces before they'd left the room earlier (_holy god how could it possibly still be the same week, _Sam thought) had been all but eradicated with the number of footprints left behind. There was still a patch behind the partly open door that he could see from where he sat, and it too had been disturbed. Figures had been pressed into the fine dusting of powder rather than drawn with a finger, pressed in from above, leaving the powder intact, his own name in Dean's handwriting, the letters as deliberate as any invocation or set of runes.

Sam wondered about the hand that had done it, because Dean was in a loose heap across his knees. He had one arm under Dean's shoulders, cradling him like they were at the end of something, keeping his brother's upper body free of the floor. Dean, still breathing, woven back together as far as Sam could get him but still not _Dean_, not pulling together and acknowledging that Sam had done the right thing and the best he could. There was nothing magical or automatic about the assemblage or the parts themselves being in the right proximity to each other, the same way red blood cells wouldn't necessarily carry oxygen just because they were shoved around by a heart. He couldn't make the parts interact. Maybe he'd missed something or not; he didn't feel anything missing in the edges and it felt like there were no weak places, nowhere left to bleed from, nowhere anything could hook its fingers in and tear. Dean had breathing room but was as secure as he'd been before any of it had happened, good or bad.

But there was nothing.

Sam could see the saltline had been broken when the door had been pulled inward. It didn't seem like that big of a deal anymore. It was dark inside and out, and the lightbulbs had all been changed but it didn't mean they worked. All the filaments were threaded together and the glass held it all in, but there was nothing when he flipped the switch.

He'd been rocking Dean as if he was a small child and didn't even realize it. The only way he knew he'd been crying was because the tears drying on his face weren't any warmer than Dean's skin in the cool early morning dark coming in the open door. All his brother was or had ever been was right there, and maybe if he waited long enough the lights would just come on when they were ready, not when he wanted or needed them to.

When he ended up at the edge of the lawn of that house again, standing on the sidewalk and staring across the unmown expanse, he didn't have the most basic idea of how he'd gotten there. He didn't really care or feel surprised that he didn't know or have any memory of getting there. He was mostly afraid that he'd left all that remained of Dean on the floor in front of an open door somewhere behind him, if any of it was real. The lights were on in every room of the house even though he knew the electricity had been turned off, and when he turned to look and see if the elemental was still there, he made out the outline of a figure that looked familiar, but he didn't name it. Naming it might assign real hope to it. Acknowledging it might make it leave, looking at it too hard might mean realizing it wasn't what he thought it was. Being beaten to death would be less painful, so he didn't look directly at it.

The dew soaked his shoes and the cuffs of his jeans when he crossed onto the grass; the expanse of lawn was just the same as he'd left it. His arms ached as if he really had spent the intervening hours folding and folding things he couldn't hold. The light gilding the windows didn't make it to the yard below, as if the house kept a jealous hold on it. Sam could see it but it never really left the house, casting no shadows and never illuminating anything past its own boundaries. It wasn't a vision; he knew that because the house was empty, stark raving vacant. There was no one moving past the windows, no illusions of what had been or might be later on.

There was no spiderweb of amber-blue for him to follow, nothing left behind. That was a relief, in a way, meaning he'd done all he could, but at the same time he wanted there to be more, something he could blame for Dean not opening his eyes and saying _get off me, dude._

He'd never asked him. He'd told Tom he was going to ask. He'd said he was going to ask as soon as he got the chance, _hey Dean are you done with all this_, and Dean deserved at least that much. It was one thing to ask Sam to let go when it was already a matter of being too late, but another to ask to be...left alone. Sam had really only meant to ask as long as he could be sure the answer wouldn't be unbearable. He'd already asked something of Dean that the latter would never, never ask out loud in return, _don't leave me, _and Dean had answered _I never would_. He didn't want there to be a chance that whatever happened to a soul once it got out was better than a life spent in crummy motel rooms with his disrespectful, overly emotional little brother. And selfish, oh, don't forget selfish because he meant to drag Dean back no matter what.

No point bringing up that he'd quit answering when Dean called for four years because just the sound of that voice made him violently homesick, made him _lose _his _resolve_. Dean would never get that, and so it had been easier to just let him think Sam was an ass. Sam had realized he'd never be anything but Dean's willing shadow unless he got out of it. He'd walked away to be himself and not Dean's brother or John's boy for once, but another five minutes of the world without Dean now was going to leave him as vacant as the house.

He wasn't even sure what the hell he was doing there; there was nothing for him to pick up. Dean was not there. All he had was Dean's feeling that the house was ready to go and that something was standing guard to say no, and if he thought about it he'd get the parallel. He just didn't want to. He kept walking toward the house and the uniformity of light it held that had nothing to reflect from, light that existed independently of the photons it was composed of. A memory of light but not Sam's memory of it.

Everything had slid to a quiet halt. The air seemed caught in place, no breeze stirring, nothing but a sense of anticipation he couldn't focus on or place. Unknowing as to which way the world would fall, as if there was still a choice.

The front door was already open, and he wasn't even surprised. He just gripped the railing in his right hand and stood at the bottom of the concrete steps and stared. There was no light, after all. Now that he was that close, the house was as dark as the night surrounding it, darker for the enclosure of walls and roof, silent, testament of nothing. Accidentally abandoned and heartbroken, just shell and shelter and once-loved construct.

He was careful not to touch the door as he went in, angling around it and into the open space of what had been a dining room and kitchen. He remembered how the house was laid out, and there was no need to tour it again. He skated his fingers along the bare walls, smooth and rough patches by turns, places where shelves or photos had hung.

He was so damn wrung out that he ended up sitting in front of the open door on his knees, feet tucked beneath, hands braced on either side of the frame, head hanging. He was crying so hard that he couldn't even be bothered to try and stop or at least keep it quiet, sobbing and trying to drag air back into his lungs without choking, each intake of air a high-pitched gasp of pain.

When you tried hard enough and you were brave enough and you did everything you were supposed to, things were supposed to turn out right or at least better than they'd been. It didn't matter that he knew better. Whatever and whoever he loved were just continually destroyed right in front of him and hope didn't live forever when faced with so many _lasts _at an age where he should mostly be finding_ firsts_. The concept of fairness as his rightful due had died an easy death in his formative years while he watched the world over his brother's shoulder. He knew better than to ask, even for what was his.

Still.

This was not fair.

Knowing better didn't keep him from sitting cross-legged right in front of the door with his hands held out palms-up over the threshold, face tucked into the crook of one elbow while he wept uncontrollably. He was out of ideas and the ability to figure out how to find any new ones just then. He was too stubborn to give up but too tired to go on and he'd reached the limit of what he could stand after _weeks_ of fear.

_He's good in ways I'm not, the world deserves him, just somebody please give him back this one time, I won't ask again, I won't ask - _

He didn't know how long he was there or how long he begged, how long he sat with hands held out over every boundary he could imagine, hoping something would cross, not caring what he might be inviting. He reached and reached with everything he was, and he'd go on doing it until someone or something dragged him away.

He couldn't even react at first when cold hands slipped into his and gripped hard enough to hurt, when someone barreled into him. Someone who was sitting on the floor next to him and pulling him over into an embrace he could only lean into.

_Sam -_

It didn't matter if it was real or not, it was good enough just to hold on for awhile.

_Sammy, c'mon, it's okay - _

He might not have been there at all, the house might not have been there; he didn't give a damn. It could all go and he wasn't in a mood to care. He recognized the hand on the back of his head that tucked his face into a shoulder he'd leaned into his whole life. If he just held on, he'd at least have that for awhile. That would be something he could keep.

"Sam. You're freaking me out, kiddo. I'm not gonna do stupid faces to make you stop like when you were two."

He was probably going to squeeze the air right out of the apparition if he kept holding on like he was. The shirt he was soaking felt real, more real than he felt. The kiss pressed into the side of his head felt real, the rough shake he got, the hand under his chin.

"C'mon, Sam. I know it still breaks your heart that Ana Lucia got killed, but you've gotta accept it. Now open your goddamn eyes or I'll slap the shit out of you."

It was like he'd sunk under, somewhere, and been forced to surface. That first breath that wasn't part of a sob, the night air on his face again, the darkness outside so much brighter than the darkness inside, all things he was glad to find again. Dean was staring at him with wide eyes that were severe with concern, nearly glaring at him. Dean, shaded with a thousand grays in the pre-dawn dark, pupils sparking amber-blue, out of breath like he'd been running for miles.

"I heard you," Dean said, one hand still on the back of Sam's head. "I'm here."

-I-


	11. Chapter 10

**Woven**, final  
(c)2006 b stearns   
a/n: huge thanks to everyone who hung in there, and thanks for the incredible reviews.

* * *

-I- 

Dean was worried.

He wasn't good at worrying. It was a waste of time. But this deserved it, because he was worried about Sam.

He wanted to talk it all over out loud with someone, he could work almost anything out aloud, but there was no one to tell and no way to say certain things without sounding like an overprotective nut, by his estimation. He'd missed most of what had happened but knew enough to realize how much it must have sucked.

There had been no pain in coming apart, because pain he could recognize in almost all its forms and he had ways of ignoring it or warding it off. Pain was easy. Shredding out into the world was the worst of all possibilities and he'd had no idea of how to deal with that. He remembered sitting by the car and staring at the elemental and knowing what it was, knowing it belonged to the house and that it wasn't sentient. People set them up all the time, sometimes without even knowing, leaving them open-ended. You just weren't supposed to see them. He remembered thinking it would be good to have Sam try and set them on the rooms they stayed in, or on the car. Or leave them behind in the places where they'd chased something away. Sam would be good at it, Sam had the kind of heart that would be able to set them for all the right reasons.

The elemental hadn't cared what the house wanted. That was the danger of setting protections and not ever taking them down, protecting long after the focus had decided enough was enough.

He remembered poking around the yard, circling the house and listening to it die. He never discussed houses with Sam, with anyone. There was no reason to. They had souls or they didn't. They contained the souls of prior inhabitants or they didn't. Talking about it was like describing _blue_ to someone born blind; you were welcome to try and come to an understanding but good luck to you.

He should have known that anything and everything would find him out in the open after what had happened earlier that night. Him not quite put together right and Sam the Psychic Wonder Chew Toy just yards away in the house, hello. The best part of all was that the lights hadn't even meant to take him apart, they'd just ended up pulling him open because there were too many of them in one place. They'd just been centering on him, and jeez, he'd actually had to admit that to Sam. He'd been pretty sure he was dying, so, free pass on that one.

They were gone, now. He wasn't sure where, and tried not to think about it. The first time he'd come apart he'd just torn a hole in himself. This time he'd opened a hole in the _world_, and maybe it wasn't big enough or deep enough to let the right and wrong things come and go between worlds on their own, but it was still an invisible blast crater that at the least invited a...pooling of some sort. He'd just let the elemental deal with that, if it could, because he didn't want to know what it would take to fill it back in. He wasn't through filling himself back in, and as long as the crater wasn't hurting anyone or anything it was best to let it go and check in every now and then. Sam might be able to tell if it was going to be a problem. Dean wouldn't _ask_ him, exactly, or say anything about it, he'd just herd Sam into standing in a particular spot, and then try and pretend he wasn't staring at him.

Ah, Sam.

After the crying had ended (never seen that before, never seen Sam cry _out loud _above the age of twelve, not like that, maybe not ever) Sam hadn't evinced anything that looked like recognizable emotion. It was like he was numb or in shock or something, and Dean wasn't subtle with his own emotions but he was good at picking out the nuances in others. Survival technique, invitation to manipulate, signals letting him know where all the weaknesses were. Sam was not 'others'. Sam still had the same way of expressing himself that he always had and Dean had always known how and when to address each to either make it better or worse. Sam shut down when he was pissed off, really pissed off as in _fuck you, done with your shit._ There'd be a clenched jaw and hooded eyes to go with the silence. He'd draw his shoulders in and curl up against people. When Sam was mad at someone, he refused to look at them. When Dean was mad, he couldn't _stop_ looking.

This, though, this was a shutting down as in _can't take any more_. Sam had flipped through their dad's journal and left it open to a certain page, then had slept ever since. Nothing restless or anxious, just sleeping hard like he hadn't been able to in months.

He needed the rest. And if he was sleeping, he wasn't randomly grabbing Dean and staring in his eyes without saying anything. Sam was not touchy-feely in anything but a verbal sense, so Dean felt it was best to shut the fuck up and put up with it for awhile. It was better than the crying. Dean needed to never hear or see that again and never, never cause it. So he'd shut up and let things go for awhile even though he was bouncing off the goddamn _walls. _He felt better than he had any right to. He wanted to know everything that had happened, and Sam wouldn't talk. Stop the presses, call National Geographic, Sam Winchester wouldn't talk beyond monosyllables. Not mad, or hurt, or even relieved. Just missing.

Dean wanted to say _I don't remember much but it was like that feeling you have when you're almost asleep, not here or there, and then you summoned me like I was any demon._

There was the big kicker. No ritual or altar or freakin' anything. Sam _was_ an altar. He didn't seem to get it or give a rat's ass about the implications like Dean did. That maybe they could stop chasing and just -

That was too far to think. He'd be quiet and keep an eye on Sam and stay close, and when Sam was rested, they'd...talk. He'd let Sam figure this one out himself.

It was best not to think too hard about what it had been like to be summoned. Only that if Sam called, there was no way to not answer.

Or maybe that was just Dean.

He sat down at the small table against the wall by the door and stared at the journal. The left page was open to the entry about _ignis fatuus_, the same pages Sam had already been looking at when they'd been headed to Fort Morgan. Folded into fourths was the article about the family who had died in the house that Dean felt he knew too much about, now. The facing page held a small picture of a guy Dean remembered from way back, and a carefully clipped obituary from some newspaper. He already knew what it said; he remembered his father gluing the scrap into place with a sigh. Tom Atcheson, 1953 - 2002, motorcycle accident. Dad hadn't found anything unusual about it so they hadn't gone looking for a supernatural culprit. They'd gone to the funeral and dad had just said _told that damn idiot to wear a helmet _and had left it at that.

After all the other stuff Tom had faced down or taught them to watch out for, it had seemed like a stupid way to die. But Dean was also of the school of _when your number's up, it's up._ Live good and crazy right up until then and hopefully after.

Turn the page.

He closed the journal carefully and stared at Sam for a little while before walking over and sitting on the edge of the bed Sam was on. Sam was on his side, facing the wall, arms folded, looking young and kind of...beaten, somehow. Like the bruises were too deep to show on the surface.

Worrying did no good, so he laid down and put his back against Sam's and folded his arms. Brother-mirrors.

-I-

"No."

Sam had awoken disgruntled with nothing in particular, just out of sorts and one step off everything. He felt like maybe he was the one unraveling, a little, or had forgotten to tuck all of his own edges in. He wasn't pissed, just a little frantic, and the best way to keep from panicking or feeling disoriented was to get Dean to rave at him about something. If Dean was yelling or bossing him, then things were fine.

"Dude," Dean said. "We're done here. Mystery solved. By seriously unconventional means, yeah, but we've done what we came to do. Nobody else is getting zapped on purpose any time soon."

"No," Sam said. "We stay put until I _know_ that you're back the way you're supposed to be and not gonna be leaving anything behind."

"How exactly are you gonna do that, Sam?" Dean said, hands on hips, feet braced, expression calm but eyes half-lidded with annoyance.

Sam raised his eyes from the laptop. Google had plenty to say about summoning, most of it bullshit so far and nothing more enlightening that what was already in the journal. There was so much to talk about that there was nothing to say. So he stared at Dean, unblinking, expressionless, still trying to get used to the idea that he'd managed to avert disaster and wasn't paying for it somehow. This was Dean, not some mix of him or facet or a new, improved version.

Dean was also arguing with him instead of saying _get your ass in the car, Sam_, and his patience said a lot about how shaken he'd been. He was trying to find a way to talk and just wasn't sure how to go about it, and Sam wasn't giving him any easy openings. If he started talking about it all, he'd drag everything out into the light, and he wasn't ready to do that. He wanted out of there as badly as Dean did, maybe worse. To not have to look at the place any more or even think about it, just gather everything and feel lucky and move on to something else. Just pick a direction and go with no destination in mind, and break Dean's goddamn phone so it would be a little while before coordinates popped up, if at all.

Dean was staring back without moving, and he was still so obviously _worried_, so Sam got up and came straight at him, causing a raising of eyebrows until he got close enough to grab him again and pull him in.

"Aw, Sam, c'mon," Dean said with exasperation.

Sam wrapped his arms around Dean and held on, chin tucked into the crook between neck and shoulder. "Shut up," he said.

Dean sighed and made an inarticulate sound of annoyance. Then he gave in and put his hands flat against Sam's back. Okay, he hugged. Maybe he hugged a little harder than he needed to or had intended to, but only because Sam was leaning over him kind of weird, that was all, jeez. Big deal.

"I'm here," he said finally. "Okay?"

"Okay," Sam said, and didn't let go.

-I-

When they left two days later it was because Sam was sure there was a place for everything and everything in its place. And, they were bored. Sam said _I'm driving, Whitney _and Dean had mumbled something under his breath that sounded obscene, but he let him do it.

On the way out of town, they sat out on the road in front of the house and stared at it without saying anything. It didn't look any different except that the windows had been boarded up. Someone had finally noticed that the windows had been blown out, and Sam wondered if they'd noticed that the glass had landed equally inside and out as if split right down the center of the panes lengthwise.

Something changed; Dean made some subtle motion without realizing it because Sam said, "No."

Dean looked at him. "What?"

"Leave it alone."

"I wasn't gonna do anything," Dean said, eyes back on the house again."You promised for both of us that it wouldn't burn."

He said it with such a faraway simplicity that it took Sam a moment to remember that he'd made that promise in his head while Dean was still...

"You remember that?" Sam said.

Dean looked at him again, at the look on his face, at the sort of hopeful wonder, and he sighed and slumped his shoulders. "You're not gonna hug me again, are you?" He was relieved when Sam grinned, regular Sam, still clingy and kind of messed up, but _Sam_. "Are we gonna hold hands?"

Sam shook his head a little and looked at the house again, a small furrow of concern developing between his brows. "It's not really a feather," he said. "You know that, right?"

Dean didn't say anything. He knew instantly that Sam was talking about what was in the trunk.

"It's put together like one but that was done on purpose," Sam said. "And the hole in the yard's not going to trap anything."

They headed east again and picked up newspapers as they went, making sure nothing was following them. Sam kept an eye on the news sites for Fort Morgan just to be safe because things didn't feel done even if there was nothing left to do.

A week later, he spun the laptop and pushed it toward Dean across the table of a diner without saying anything.

Dean scanned the page for almost half a minute, expression never changing. Then he closed the laptop and went back to eating the best homemade chicken soup he'd probably _ever_ had while it was still hot.

"Not gonna say anything?" Sam said.

Dean shrugged. "Rare, but not impossible."

"Lightning hit that house and burned it to the ground, yesterday," Sam said. "Plain old lightning."

"Funny, how things work out," Dean said.

-I- -I- -I-


End file.
